“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Alex James' Story

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Alex James' Story  

Revised Introduction by Zack James

[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons having to do with participating in the events on May Day 1971 when the most radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material published on the subject mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak then and after.)

Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected, selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of the Cold War red scare freeze, the righteous black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the forsaken huge anti-Vietnam War movement later. Part of the mix too and my oldest brother Alex, one of Markin’s fellow corner boys from the old neighborhood is a prime example, was just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, like Markin an Alex, away from elite colleges and anything goes urban centers.   The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came in reaction to that dread.

This series came about because my already mentioned oldest brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on business and noticed on a passing Muni bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”

When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in North Adamsville, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way once they got going. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]              

To the memory of the late Peter Paul Markin on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary year of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967

[Although this small tribute book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Paul Markin from the corner boys days of the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and will have contributions from all the surviving member of that tribe there are other corner boys who have passed away, a couple early on in that bloody hell called Vietnam, Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse, RIP brothers, you did good in a bad war, Allan Jackson, Allan Stein, “Bugger” Shea and Markin’s old comrade, Billy Bradley. You guys RIP too.]          

By Alex James

Let’s get this whole, I will put it in capitals just like the sociologists of the event and whoever puts anything about it on YouTube, Summer of Love.1967 thing straight. This whole turning away for a while by most of us corner boys from the Acre from the “square” nine to five, little white picket fence with kids and dogs thing was totally and solely the work of one Peter Paul Markin. Markin whom our acknowledged leader Frankie Riley dubbed the “Scribe” and I will call him that hereafter was the first one of us to get a whiff of the fresh breeze as he called it of something new and different coming down the road. Excuse my language but while the rest of us on those strange and sometimes oddly eventful Friday and Saturday were worrying about getting enough dough together for a date, or if without a date getting one, or if with a date getting some action from the chick, getting laid, “doing the do” as we called it the Scribe was like some fucking prophet proclaiming the new day coming. And seriously all through high school we could have given a fuck about what he was talking about.       

Don’t get me wrong the Scribe was a good guy to have a round most days and while no way he could lead the guys, even now the idea is totally preposterous, he, aside from that “new day coming” bullshit was a straight up guy. Was the guy we looked to, including Frankie, to tell us what was going on right then. That “right then” was whatever scheme he had figured out, okay, what con or midnight sneak job he had figured out, legal or illegal mostly the latter, for us to get money to have a shot at those dates and a shot at “doing the do.” Moreover since behind that larcenous, grand larcenous if there is such a term little head of his he was a conduit to the girls. See he was the “sensitive” guy, the guy who liked poetry and literature which we could have given a fuck about but which a lot of girls at school and around town were into and they would flock around him and tell him stuff-like who they liked or didn’t like. Liked and didn’t like among the corner boys especially and he would pitch or not pitch for us. The funny part like with the larcenous schemes which no way would he execute but left to Frankie’s fiendish organizing Markin never had dates with those girls, none in town either. He would run over to Harvard Square find some “folkie” chick he called them and some of them were foxes, were bowled over by his knowledge of folk music and by his prophecy that some new breeze was coming that girls like that went crazy for at the time.              

That is all stuff though while we were in high school mostly although Markin’s Harvard Square rendezvous thing continued after we graduated from old North Adamsville High in 1965. Of course like any group in high school once everybody graduated (a couple of our guys didn’t until 1966 for some reason not germane here) they went to a degree in their own directions mostly to work, a few like Frankie and the Scribe to college. But we would gather, whoever was around, several times a year for the next couple of years to keep in touch and to “keep the flame” as the Scribe called it lit. Things just went along for most of us like they had for our parents, start working, work your way up some ladder, or get started anyway, get more steady in the girl department (although no guy I knew, corner boy or not, passed on a stray encounter whether they were seriously “going steady’, engaged or married for that matter), began that uphill climb toward marriage, kids, pets and the picket fence.

All of us except the late Ricky Russo who had volunteered right out of high school and would become an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam before being blown away in some stinking village in the Central Highlands were scared as hell of the draft which lingered over our heads (a couple of other corner boys beside Ricky would volunteer when the sense they were to be called up and another guy, Allan Jackson, “volunteered” through the justice system after being caught stealing six cars out of the local car dealership lot one drunken night by having the option of five years in the can or go into the Army thrown at him)      

Then in the early spring of 1967 the Scribe shocked all of us by telling us that he was quitting college, quitting Boston University to go “find himself” out West, out in California, out in San Francisco although that destination came later. Remember this is a working class kid whose folks had no dough for college, none not with five boys to raise, who got a scholarship and some other financial deal to go giving that all up  to “find himself.” We all knew a girl, a wild Irish girl, Mary Shea, had gotten into his head and had gone West already but to give up that scholarship and to face the draft straight up with the loss of his student exemption was crazy and we told him so. He just said to us the “new day” was here and he did not want to miss the opportunity. He would take his chances with the draft. A fateful, a very fateful, decision which would eventually lead to his downfall.              

In any case the Scribe dropped out put a knapsack or two together, maybe that second thing was a bedroll and headed West, hitchhiking like some Jack Kerouac On The Road character, bum we called it. The Scribe in high school had made us all read the book, or parts of it, or he would read parts of it to us but mostly we could have given a fuck about hitchhiking and old timer adventurers and 1940s passe cars although Dean Moriarty the king of the road seemed cool to me. We all wanted cars, fast cars, and not sticking our thumbs out on some desolate road waiting for some desperate pervert to pick us up. (The Scribe’s cross-country hitchhike run would be the first of many that he, and all the rest of us who headed west in his wake, would take before the ebb tide set in and you just couldn’t depend on that mode of transportation to get you across town never mind across country.) So the Scribe was in Frisco town when the whole thing exploded, when drugs became a serious part of youth nation life, when the music got amped up and the chains that held previous society, or the youth part anyway or maybe I had better say part of the youth part since most young people as it turned out went about their square lives being square (it would take the rest of us, or most of the rest of us, a while, a few years anyway to get back in harness), when consensual sex became a lovely experience rather than just hormonal hunger (although that came into it too) and other ways of organizing your life were explored (not all for the better but mostly if you could keep the pyschos and crazies at bay).        

The Scribe hitchhiked back to the Acre in late summer on a mission. Get his square, hanging around mopping, nowhere corner boys to pack up and head west on another run. I was between jobs, between girls and bored enough to jump when the Scribe called the tune. (The dope he brought back for us, we “liquor heads” to try helped once the initial fear and hassle of drugs and the old junkie stigma evaporated in a haze). Frankie would also go out on that trip although I think his first trip out like Josh’s was on the stinking five or six day Greyhound bus out (that experience would get both men on the hitchhike road thereafter after dealing with that craziness). And everything was in late 1967 for the most part as advertised. I went back and forth for the next couple of years but mostly staying out there after we hooked up with mad man savior helmsman Captain Crunch and his magical mystery tour bus but I think Josh will deal with that episode so I will end here. 

End here except to say I believe we all were, maybe still are grateful that the Scribe put us on the road, had given us a few years of breaking out, jail breaking out of our doomed Acre existences. Everybody who went out after the Scribe survived for a long while except Ralph Morse who died in the swampy stinking Mekong Delta and of course Ricky Russo who never got a chance to go West with us before his death. And except sad to say the Scribe whose decision back in the spring of 1967 to “find himself”’ would several years later wind up costing him his precious life in a dirty dusty backroad down in Sonora, Mexico with two slugs in his head after what apparently was a busted drug deal since we never got conclusive information about exactly what had happened before we were warned off by the Federales down there.

Fateful since the Scribe was eventually drafted in late 1968 and having then no serious reason not to accept induction did so and wound up in Vietnam which changed him in many ways that he could not have imagined back in 1967. He like a lot of guys who were in what they called ‘Nam had trouble adjusting to the “ real” world coming back and he drifted into this and that writing assignment out in the West Coast for a while, did the remarkable “Brothers Under The Bridge” series about guys, veterans, like him living out there in their alternative community under the bridges, along the railroad tracks and aside the arroyos for the East Bay Eye, long defunct, had a wife for a while and was living with our old adopted corner boy Josh Breslin when he got seriously into a cocaine addiction. Began “running” product back and forth to Mexico at a time when cocaine was becoming the drug of choice and the beginning of the serious cartels. The last Josh knew the Scribe was down south of the border doing a run or trying to put a deal together. Something went wrong on one end or the other and the Scribe now rests in a potter’s field down in Sonora and still missed, crazy missed as we used to call it when we hadn’t seen somebody we loved for a while. Well he is still crazy missed by this guy. Thanks for the fresh breeze Scribe, thanks.           

Folk Rock’s Elder Statesman- Neil Young- Back In The Days

Folk Rock’s Elder Statesman- Neil Young- Back In The Days

CD Review

Harvest, Neil Young and various sidemen, Reprise Records, 1972

I have mentioned in a previous review of the work of Neil Young, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, that pound for pound in those days he and Crazy Horse stood tall in the rock pantheon. Maybe not as tall as the Stones or The Doors but somewhere in the mix. Now, getting close to forty years later, Neil has morphed into folk rock’s elder statesman and still puts out some creative work. That is not what interests me now though, at least not directly. What is interesting about this “Harvest” CD is how much of the best work here reflects where Neil Young was heading after that brilliant “heavy rock/psychedelic rock” flash of work with Crazy Horse (and his work before that with several other groups). Some of the songs like the classic “Heart Of Gold”, “Old Man” and “Words” could have fit very nicely on, say, his fairly recent “Prairie” CD. And that, my friends, is indeed a compliment.


"Heart Of Gold"

I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean
for a heart of gold
I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
That keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

Keep me searching
for a heart of gold
You keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm growing old.
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.

Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

Jim Morrison and The Doors- WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up.         

CD REVIEW

THE BEST OF THE DOORS, ELECTRA ASYLUM RECORDS, 1985


In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on. The subject of the following review, Jim Morrison and the Doors, is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Some of that influence is apparent here in this essentially greatest hits album.

More than one rock critic has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution more broadly, or chronologically, other CDs do an adequate job but they are helter-skelter. This CD edition has, with maybe one or two exceptions, all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960’s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour)- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including this writer, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of “cultural wars” in revenge by his protégés, hangers-on and their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very young-then)

We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.    

I also knew Allan Ginsberg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.) 

This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsberg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsberg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope, the new religion for the lonely and the lonesome. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsberg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBERG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

*(We have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50^th anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac.) 

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

On The Anniversary Of The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrsion- AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors

On The Anniversary Of The Death Of The Doors' Jim Morrsion- AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors

Zack James comment: My oldest brother, Alex, who was in the thick of the Summer of Love along with his corner boys from North Adamsville above all the later Peter Paul Markin who led them out to the Wild West said that the few times that he/they saw The Doors either in Golden Gate Park at free, I repeat, free outdoor concerts or at the Avalon or Fillmore which were a great deal more expensive, say two or three dollars, I repeat two or three dollars that The Doors when they were on, meaning when Jim Morrison was in high dungeon, was in a drug-induced trance and acted the shaman for the audience nobody was better. Having been about a decade behind and having never seen Morrison in high dungeon or as a drug-induced shaman but having listened to various Doors compilations I think for once old Alex was onto something. Listen up.         

From American Left History

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

*AND AGAIN-WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW! - The Music Of Jim Morrison And The Doors 
CD Review

Waiting For The Sun, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Rhino, 2007

Since my youth I have had an ear for American (and other roots music), whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

The Doors are roots music? Yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derives from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture. Some of that influence is apparent here.

More than one rock critic has argued that at their best the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of the Doors. If you want to trace their evolution other CD’s, like this “Waiting For The Sun” album do an adequate job. Stick outs here include: the anti-war classic "The Unknown Soldier," “Love Street,” and "Spanish Caravan".

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix who lived fast and died young. The slogan- Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And creative. Even the most political, including this writer, among us felt those cultural winds and counted those who espoused this vision as part of the chosen. Those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change without a political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

MARK THIS WELL. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents at the time, exemplified by one Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. 40 years of ‘cultural wars’ by his protégés in revenge is a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough.

The Unknown Soldier Lyrics

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier, uh hu-uh

Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Hut!
Hut!
Hut ho hee up!
Comp'nee,
Halt!
Pree-sent arms!

Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head

And, it's all over,
The war is over.
It's all over, war is over.
It's all over, baby!
All over, baby!
All, all over, yeah!
Aah, hah-hah.
All over, all over, babe!
Oh! Oh yeah!
All over, all over!
Ye-e-e-ah…

A “Not Bob Dylan”- The Music Of Tom Paxton-An Encore

Happy Birthday To You-

By Lester Lannon

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

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

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

A “Not Bob Dylan”- The Music Of Tom Paxton-An Encore

CD Review

Live At Huntingdon Hall, Tom Paxton, 2007


A couple of years ago I did a series of reviews of male folk artists from the 1960s folk revival whom I had listened to, liked for one reason or another, and wondered aloud about why they had not achieved the lasting fame and fortune of the iconic male folksinger of the period, Bob Dylan. The musician under review, Tom Paxton, a fellow denizen of the Greenwich Village folk scene along with Dylan and fellow madman, the late Dave Van Ronk, in the early 1960s was one of those I reviewed. I chalked Paxton's “failure” to be Bob Dylan up to his association to one that Van Ronk character and his stubborn willfulness not to attain celebrity at the price of folk purity. And I do not think I am wrong on that account.

Fast forward to recent times. Tom and I find ourselves across from each other at a locally famous Cambridge coffee house (aka folk club) where he performed many of the songs from this live album-live. The voice may not have that same resonance, the on-stage patter may be a little threadbare but he still performed (along with guitarist Geoff Bartley) very nicely thank you. That, after all, is why a folk aficionado like myself goes to see the “old-timers”. To see if they still have that something from the old days, all proportions guarded, of course.

Moreover on this album , Paxton’s old standard, his eternal standard, the one he has stated that he never tires of singing, "Last Thing On My Mind”, is worth the price of admission, as it was here. Also a newer one, “Comedians and Angels”.

The Last Thing on my Mind
Words and Music by Tom Paxton

It's a lesson too late for the learnin'
Made of sand, made of sand
In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin'
In your hand, in your hand.

[Cho:]
Are you going away with no word of farewell?
Will there be not a trace left behind?
Well, I could have loved you better,
Didn't mean to be unkind.
You know that was the last thing on my mind.

You've got reasons a-plenty for goin'.
This I know, this I know.
For the weeds have been steadily growin'.
Please don't go, please don't go.

[Cho:]

As we walk on, my thoughts are a-tumblin',
Round and round, round and round.
Underneath our feet the subways rumblin',
Underground, underground.

[Cho:]

As I lie in my bed in the mornin',
Without you, without you.
Every song in my breast dies a bornin',
Without you, without you.

[Cho:]


Someone has written a parody verse for this song and it must have tickled Paxton's funny bone because he's sung it in the UK and it's on his "Live in the UK" Album. Roger Peek was kind enough to send the lyrics:

Well I met this young girl at a folk club,
Like you do, like you do.
So I bought her a drink and we chatted,
Wouldn't you, wouldn't you.

And then after the show she invited me home,
And she said we were two of a kind,
Then she played me every record
That Tom Paxton ever made,
And you know that was the last thing on my mind.

Once Again -Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

Once Again -Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber  

One night Sam Eaton was talking on his cellphone to his old friend from high school (Carver High, Class of 1967), Jack Callahan about how his grandson, Brandon, the oldest grandson of his daughter Janice from his first marriage (first of three all ending in divorce but that is merely a figure for the Census Bureau and not germane to what follows so enough) had beguiled him recently with his arcane knowledge of classical jazz (the jazz from the age of King Oliver say until the death of the big bad swings bands which died in the late 1940s for the most part giving way to cool ass be-bop and what followed).

Jack braced himself for the deluge, got very quiet and did not say word one, since lately the minute Sam mentioned, maybe even thought about mentioning the slightest thing connected with jazz he knew he was in for it, in for a harangue of unknown duration on the subject. Sam, recently more conscious that Jack, who hated jazz, hated it worse when as a child of rock and roll as Sam was, his father would endlessly play Count this, King that, Duke the other thing and not allow the family record player centered in the family living room to be sullied (his father’s word) by heathen stuff like Roll Over Beethoven or One Night With You, would go silent at the word “jazz” said not to worry he would only say a few words from his conversation with Brandon:        

No, Jack, my man, this will not be a screed about how back in the day, back in the 1950s the time of our complete absorption into rock and roll, when be-bop jazz was the cat’s meow, when cool was listening to the Monk trip up a note, consciously trip up a note to see if anybody caught it and then took that note to heaven and back, and worked it out from there or Dizzy burping then hitting the high white note all those guys were struggling against the limits of the instruments to get, high as hell on tea, you know what we called ganja, herb, stuff like that.

Frankly I was too young, you too but I knew how you felt since I couldn’t listen to rock in my house either as the 1940s Andrews Sisters/Perry Como/Frank Sinatra/Peggy Lee cabal were front and center in our living room and I was reduced to listening on my transistor radio, way too young to appreciate such work then and I only got the tail end, you know when Hollywood or the popular prints messed the whole be-bop jazz “beat” thing up and we got spoon-fed Maynard G. Krebs faux black and white television beatnik selling hair cream oil or something like that, and ten thousand guys hanging around the Village on Saturday night in full beret and whatever they could put together for a beard from the outreaches of Tenafly, New Jersey (sorry but Fort Lee was out) and another ten thousand gals, all in black from head to toe, maybe black underwear too so something to imagine at least from Norwalk, Connecticut milling around as well. Square, square cubed.


No, this will not be some screed going back further in the hard times of the Great Depression and the slogging through World War II when “it did not mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing” when our parents, the parents of the kids who caught the end of be-bop “swang,” did dips and twirls to counts, dukes, earls, princes, marquises even leading big band splashes to wash that generation clean. Come on now that was our parents and I wasn’t even born so no way I can “screed” about that. And, no, no, big time no, this will not be about some solitary figure in some dank, dusty, smoke-filled café, the booze flowing, the dope in the back alleys inflaming the night while some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blows some eternal high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene.

No, it never even came close to starting out like that, never even dreamed such scenes. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in our 1950s growing up time and which we have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to, later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase, a few bing, bang, bong notes blowing out the window, out the door, sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men were looking for them but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music had decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.          

About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington being celebrated when I was listening to some radio show which was commemorating that fact and I heard a few faint bars which required me to both turn up the volume and to listen to the rest of the one hour tribute. The show played a lot of Duke’s stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms up, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, how his tonal poems reached deep, deep down and caught something in me that responded in kind. Especially when those sexy saxs, when Johnny or Cootie blew me away if they let it all hang out.

Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound before, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blown blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica of his on Little Red Rooster and Smokestack Lightnin’. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty sultry voice, the voice that chased the blues, my blues, away.

So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big cloud puff high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Check this out. Blowing that high white note out into the surly choppy Japan deep blue seas foaming and slashing out into the bay the one time I was sitting in fog-bound Frisco town, sitting around a North Beach bar, the High Hat maybe, back when Jimmy La Croix ran the place and a guy with a story, or a guy he knew could run a tab, for a while, and then settle up or let the hammer fall and you would wind up cadging swigs from flea-bitten raggedy- assed winos and sterno bums.

On Monday nights, a slow night in every venue you can name except maybe whorehouses and even then the business would  fall off only a little since guys had to see their wives or girlfriends or both sometime, Jimmy would hold what is now called an “open mic” but then, I forget, maybe talent search something like that but the same thing. The “Hat” as everybody called it was known far and wide by ex hep-cats, aging beats, and faded flower child ex-hippies who had not yet got back to the “real” world once those trends petered out but were still looking, as I was, looking for something and got a little solace from the bottle and a dark place to nurse the damn thing where you could be social or just hang out was the place around North Beach where young talent took to the boards. Played, played for the “basket” just like the folkies used to do back in the 1960s when that genre had its heyday, and probably get a few dollars from the mostly regular heavy drinker crowd that populate any gin mill on Monday, whether they have seen their loved ones or not.

Jimmy would have Max Jenny on drums and Milt Bogan on that big old bass that took up half the stage, if you remember those guys when West Coast jazz was big, to back-up the talent so this was serious stuff, at least Jimmy played it that way.

Most of the stuff early on that night was so-so some riffs stolen from more famous guys like Miles Davis, Dizzie, Coltrane, the cool ass jazz from the fifties that young bud talent imitates starting out, maybe gets stuck on those covers and wind up, addled by some sister habit, down by the trolley trains on Market Street hustling dollars from weary tourists waiting to get up the damn hill. So nothing that would keep a steady drinker, me, from steady drinking in those days when I lifted low-shelf whiskeys with abandon. Maybe half a dozen other guys spread out around bar to prove they were there strictly for the drinking and chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes to fill up Jimmy’s ashtrays and give Red the bartender something to do between pouring shots (otherwise the guys hungry for women company would be bunched near the dance floor but they must have had it bad since Monday night the serious honeys were not at the “Hat” but home getting rested up for the long week ahead of fending guys off).

Then I turned around toward the stage, turned around for no particular reason, certainly not to pay attention to the talent, when this young guy, young black guy, barely out of his teens, maybe sixteen for all I know and snuck out of the house to play, Jimmy wasn’t taking ID cards in those days and if the kid wasn’t drinking then what did it matter, to get play to reach the stars if that is what he wanted, slim a reed, dressed kind of haphazardly with a shiny suit that he probably wore to church with grandmother, string tie, clean shirt, couldn’t see his feet so can’t comment on that, maybe a little from hunger, or had the hunger eating him up. Kind of an unusual sight for ‘90s Frisco outside of the missions. But figure this, figure his eyes, eyes that I know about from my own bouts with sister, with the just forming sad sack yellow eyes of high king hell dope-dom and it all fit.

The kid was ready though to blow a big sexy tenor sax, a sax as big as he was, certainly fatter, blew the hell out of one note after another once he got his bearings, then paused, paused to suck up the universe of the smoke filled air in the place (a whiff of ganja from the back somewhere from some guy Jimmy must have known since usually dope in the place was a no-no), and went over to the river Jordan for a minute, rested, came back with a big blow that would get at least to Hawaii, rested again, maybe just a little uncertain where to go like kids always are, copy some somebody and let it go at that for the Monday crowd or blast away, but even I sensed that he had something going, so blew up a big cloud puff riff alternating with pauses hard to do, went at it again this time to the corner of paradise.

Stopped then, I thought he was done, he looked to hell like he was done, done in eyes almost closed, and then onward, a big beautiful dah, dee, dah, dee, dah, dee, blow, a “max daddy” blow then even an old chattering wino in a booth stopped to wonder at, and that big high white note went ripping down Bay Street, I swear I could see it, on into the fog-bound bay and on its way, not stopping until Edo, hell maybe back to Mother Africa where it all started.  He had it, that it means only “it” and if he never blew again he had that “it” moment. He left out the back door and I never saw him at the “Hat” again so maybe he was down on Mission or maybe he went somewhere, got some steady work. All I know was that I was there when a guy blew that high white note, yeah, that high white note. So yeah count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.

See I didn’t take too long, right.             

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street"-For Donald J.Trump

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street"-For Donald J.Trump

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.


Positively 4th Street



You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning

You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning

You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it

You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it

When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it

No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them

And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music

"Our Side of Town" – A Red House Records 25th Anniversary Collection”- A CD Review

"Our Side of Town" – A Red House Records 25th Anniversary Collection”- A CD Review

CD Review

“Our Side of Town – A Red House Records 25th Anniversary Collection”
Various Artists, Red House Records, 2008


I have, except as the occasion called for it as in the case of Sun Records or Chess Records, not spent much time discussing the various ups and downs of particular record labels and their attempts to corner a piece of the music market. There is certainly history there, sometimes very interesting history as in the cases of those labels mentioned above, but I leave that for others to toil over. I prefer to concentrate on various musical influences that flow through the folk world, except that here one can not avoid, or should not avoid, paying some respect to the Red House Record label that has been a mainstay of post-1960s folk revival folk music and artists.

Frankly, I know Red House mainly as the long time vehicle for one of the artists performing on this anniversary CD, Greg Brown. And also for a few late efforts by Rosalie Sorrels, especially her tribute to Utah Phillips last year. Of course, those two names tell you much about what this label is about and about the musical traditions of not just the past 25 years of folk and folk rock but the last half century.

This label has also been the launching pad for some lesser known names like Jimmy LaFave, Lucy Kaplansky, Eliza Gilkyson, and the Wailin’ Jenny’s. What you have here, my friends, are tributes by the performers who have struggled, and sometimes struggled in lonely spots, to keep the folk genre part of the great American songbook. So match up the performers and the label and you have quite a piece of history and a primer of the latter-day folk scene. Listen up.