Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-**Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Songs To Sit Around The Soda Fountain By- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Angels performing Cry Baby Cry.

CD Review

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The ‘60s: Teen Time, Time-Life Music, 1991

Every “teenage nation” generation since they started to place teenage-hood as a distinct phase of life between childhood and young adulthood over a century ago has developed it own tribal rituals and institutions. Today’s teens seem to have cornered food courts at the mall, video arcades and the ubiquitous Internet screen connections through various look-at techno-gadgets although, frankly, I am not fully current on all their mores, customs and tribal language.

What I am familiar with, very familiar with, is the teen institutions of my generation, the generation of ’68, that came of teen age in the early 1960s. Our places of rendezvous were the corners in front of mom and pop variety stores in the days before franchise 7/11 came to dominate the quick stop one item shopping market; the every present pizza parlor with its jump jukebox where we deposited more than a few nickels, dimes and quarters; for some of the dweebs (or if you wanted to get away with a “cheap” date, but only as a last resort ) the bowling alley; the open air drive-in restaurants complete with car hops for more “expensive” dates; and, for serious business, meaning serious girl and boy watching, the soda fountain. And not, in my case, just any soda fountain but the soda fountain at the local individually-owned drug store that used the fountain to draw people (read, kids: what would we need prescription drugs for, those were for old people, we were invincible) into the store.

That last scene is what will drive this review, and for a simple reason. The cover of this CD (which is part of a huge Rock ‘n’ Roll Era set of CDs from this period) under review, The 60s; Teen Time, has an illustration of just such a classic soda fountain, complete with three whimsical teen-age frills (read girls, if you are not from my old working class neighborhood) all sipping their straws out of one, can you believe it, one paper cup while a faux Fabian-type looks on. Ah, be still my heart.

Needless to say this scene, complete with its own jukebox setup (although not every drug store had them, ours didn’t), the booths with the vinyl-covered seats and Formica top tables (with paper place settings, condiments, etc., right), the soda fountain granite (maybe faux granite) counter, complete with swivel around stools that gave the odd boy or two (read: me and my boys) a better vantage point to watch the traffic come in the store (read: girls). Said counter also complete with glassed-encased pie (or donut) cases; the various utensils for making frappes (that a New England thing, look it up), milkshakes, and cherry-flavored Cokes; a small grille for hamburgers, hot dogs and fries (or the odd boy grilled cheese sandwich with bacon); and, well a soda jerk (usually a guy) to whip up the orders. Oh, did I say girl and boy watching. Ya, I did. Still, what do you think we were all there for? The ice cream and soda? Come on. Does it really take an hour or an hour and a half to drink a Pepsi even in teen-land?

Enough said about the décor because the mere mention of the term “soda jerk” brings to mind a Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood story, Frankie of a thousand stories and Frankie who was the king hill skirt-chaser (read: girl), and my best friend in middle school (a.k.a. junior high) and high school. Ya, that Frankie, or rather this time Frankie’s sister. Now when we were juniors in high school we mainly held court at the local pizza parlor which in the pecking order was way above the soda fountain. That was for kids, unless, of course, things were tough at the pizza joint (meaning girl-free) and we meandered up the street to Doc’s drug store soda fountain to check out the action there.

Of course, before we graduated to the “bigs” the old soda fountain was just fine. And it did no harm, no harm at all, to strike up friendships , or at least stay on the good side of the soda jerks so you get an extra scoop of ice cream or a free refill on your Coke. Whatever. See, the soda jerk was usually the guy (and like I said before it was always guys, girls would probably be too distracted by every high energy teen guy, including dweeb-types, trying to be “cool”) connected the dots and said who was who and what was what in the local teen scene. But the thing is that the soda jerk also had some cache with the girls, I guess it must have been the uniform. Wow! Personally I wouldn’t have been caught dead wit that flap cap they wore.

So one night we are dried up (read: no girls) at the pizza parlor and decided, as usual, to meander up the street to Doc’s. We had heard earlier in the day that Doc had a new jerk on and we wanted to check him out anyway. As we entered who do we see but Frankie’s sister, Lorrie, Frankie’s fourteen year old sister, talking up a storm, all dewy-eyed, over this new jerk, who must have been about eighteen. And this “cradle-robber” had his arm around, or kind of around, Lorrie. Old Frankie saw red, no double red, if not more.

See, Frankie was a guy who had more girls lined up that he could ever meet and be able to keep himself in one piece, although he has only one serious frail (read: girl again okay) that kept his interest over time (Joanne that I told you about before when I was doing a Roy "The Boy" Orbison review). So Frankie was no stranger to the old male double standard of the age, especially in regard to his sister. Not that he was really protective of her as much as he was insulted (so he told me later) by some new “jerk” trying to make moves to become king of the hill by “courting: Frankie’s sister.

And Frankie, old wiry, slender, quick-fisted Frankie was tough. Tougher than he looked. So naturally new boy “jerk” takes umbrage (nice word, right?) when Frankie starts to move “sis” away with him. Well the long and short of it was that Frankie and “jerk” started to beef a little but it is all over quickly and here is why. Frankie took an ice cream cone, a triple scoop, triple-flavored ice cream cone no less, that was sitting in a cup in front of a girl customer ( a cute girl who I wound up checking out seriously later) and bops, no be-bops, no be-bop bops one soda jerk, new or not, with it. Now if you have ever seen an eighteen year old guy, in uniform, with hat on, I don’t care if it is only a soda jerk’s uniform wearing about three kinds of ice cream on that uniform you know, you have to know that this guy’s persona non grata with the girls and “cool” guys in town forevermore.

Or so you would think. Frankie went out of town for a few days to do something on family business (not related)after this incident and one night near the edge of town as I was walking with that young girl customer whose ice cream Frankie scooped (I bought her another one, thank god I had a little cash on me, and that is why I was walking with her then, thank you) when I saw one Lorrie sitting, sitting like the Queen of Sheba, in Mr. Soda Jerk’s 1959 boss cherry red Chevy listening to Cry Baby Cry by The Angels as “mood” music on the background car radio that I could faintly hear. Just don’t tell Frankie, okay.

And that is what drove the girls in those days to the kind of music presented in this compilation. Most of it was strictly from some Teen Romance notion of what girls, girls who bought records in vast quantities to while away their giggling girlish listening hours, though would sell. This stuff was definitely not classic rock like Elvis when he was young and hungry. Or Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley. No way. What this, mainly, was now that we were high strung teens very aware of what sex was, if not always what to do about it, that previously mentioned mood music. And while one would not be caught dead dancing to this stuff at a dance, even a school dance, out on the beach, in the car, or wherever boys and girls went to “be alone” this was the background music.

That said the ones that, as I recall in the mist of time, that set the “mood” best were, of course (ask my ice cream girl) Cry Baby Cry by the Angels; Sugar Shack by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs: Clarence Henry’s classic make-up song, You Always Hurt The One You Love; and, Trouble In Paradise by The Crests.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-As Hometown Lowell Celebrates- *On The 60th Anniversary Of Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl”Writer's Corner- Jack Kerouac's (And Others) Film"Pull My Daisy"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip (Part One And Then Link To Parts Two And Three From There) Of Jack Kerouac's (And Others)"Beat" Generation Classic "Pull My Daisy" As Mentioned In The Review Of John Cohen's "There Is No Eye" CD.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-As Hometown Lowell Celebrates- On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957) Writers' Corner- Jack Kerouac's (And Others) Film"Pull My Daisy"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957) Writers' Corner- Jack Kerouac's (And Others) Film"Pull My Daisy"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip (Part One And Then Link To Parts Two And Three From There) Of Jack Kerouac's (And Others)"Beat" Generation Classic "Pull My Daisy" As Mentioned In The Review Of John Cohen's "There Is No Eye" CD.

See following site for more information about "Pull My Daisy".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_My_Daisy_(poem)

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine),   Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

*Writer's Corner- Jean Genet's "Our Lady Of The Flowers"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French writer and playwright Jean Genet's first novel, "Our Lady Of The Flowers".

Book Review

Our Lady Of The Flowers, Jean Genet, 1943

Recently, in reviewing the texts for some of the plays by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of his first novel, “Our Lady Of The Flowers”, as well:

“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his somewhat autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”

I also noted in a review of “The Maids” that, fortunately, by the time that I got around to reading (and seeing) then such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Especially about the overt homosexuality and masturbatory fantasies that dominate the story line, a plot, moreover, set in prison and concerning the French version of those lumpen elements, from the Parisian streets and waterfront, that I mentioned above that I grew up around in the 1950s. This reading is not for everyone, as literature or as prod to sexual fantasy, but it certainly is in the great French tradition of literature down at the base of society. And certainly a kindred spirit to Celine’s novelistic approach. The problem for us is, as the short-loved Paris Commune of 1871 found out, this lumpen social layer, this human dust form the “shock troops” for the reaction when society slides into a revolutionary period. For now though, read this.

Happy Birthday Keith Richards- *Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle (No Pun Intended)- “School Of Rock”- A Film Review

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "School Of Rock".

DVD Review

School of Rock, Jack Black and Joan Cusack, 2003

What is there not to like, for an old rock ‘n’ roll guy or gal at least, about a film with a story line about a down and out fanatic grunge rock musician who is at his wits end and then, by odd happenstance, gets a “temp” job, under false pretenses, teaching at a preppie private elementary school. And , of course, along the way it turns out the young students whom he was let loose on were really not looking to get ahead on the fast track to college but were really hiding their “inner rock” being under a bushel, of some sort. Needless to say said rocker teacher throws out the books, gets the kids to lighten up and enjoy life a little, and maybe get a chance at rock stardom for themselves and, not coincidentally, for him as well. Those well-to-do parents paying large fees and the authority figures responsible to those parental whims, especially one stern headmistress, do not, however, see to see with this rock-driven program. But all is well in the end as kids and rocker survive one more obstacle in the ordeal of childhood. The only point that I need to add here is that actor/comedian, Jack Black, carries this whole thing with his energy, his facial expressions and his non-loser “loser” approach to the role. That said, just rock on.

*In The Time Of The Teenage Music Counterrevolution- The Music Of The Everly Brothers

A YouTube's Clip Of The Everly Brothers Doing "All I Have To Do Is Dream".



CD REVIEW

The Everly Brothers: All-Time Original Hits, Rhino Records, 1999



There was a time in my youth, in the late 1950's, just after the hullabaloo of the original emergence of rock&roll as a threat to national security with the rise of the likes of Bill Halley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and the like had subsided and before the British invasion that revitalized rock had surfaced teenage popular music hit a bump in the road. During that time young male singers like Ricky Nelson, Bobby Dee, Fabian, Conway Twitty and the singers under review, the Everly Brothers, emerged or were pushed forward to fill in the blanks. This was a period where there was a conscious effort to tone down, sweeten up and bastardize rock. Although the Everly Brothers cannot be said to have been the cultural force behind that movement, after all they just wanted to sing, make money and be popular with the girls, they certainly benefited from this shift in the popular music industry. Other more sinister adult forces led the charge to this homogenized music.

That said, on their own terms the brothers were hardly the worst of the lot in presenting this kind of music to their teenage public, especially those adoring, dreamy-eyed white suburban girls whose allegiance drove their material up the pop charts. Some of their work, included for your inspection here, can and should be considered classics of this dark period in American teenage music. While the Everly Brothers on their best days will never have the force of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll", Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" or Jerry Lee's "Breathless', their clean, well produced music and okay instrumentation will survive on the second or third echelon of the rock pantheon.

Who, from that generation, can forget the panic lyrics that drive the story line of "Wake Up Little Susie" or the very danceable "All I Have To Do Is Dream" and "Let It Be Me". Teen angst, meaning not having a boy or girl friend is well represented by "Crying In The Rain" and "Cathy's Clown". Can't you just visualize those old school gym dances now. Ya, that is what the brothers were successfully catering to don't you know. For those of us who could not dance, were girl-shy or lacked the proper boffo- haired appearance of the singers of the period we got our chances later but for those guys handy with a slick comb this was their time-and the Everlys'.


Wake Up Little Susie Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Everly Brothers

Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
We’ve both been sound asleep, wake up, little Susie, and weep
The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock, and we’re in trouble deep
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well

Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well

I told your mama that you’d be in by ten
Well Susie baby looks like we goofed again
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home

Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
The movie wasn’t so hot, it didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well

Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie

All I Have To Do Is Dream Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Everly Brothers

Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream
When I want you in my arms
When I want you and all your charms
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream

When I feel blue in the night
And I need you to hold me tight
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam

I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine
Anytime night or day
Only trouble is, gee whiz
I’m dreamin’ my life away

I need you so that I could die
I love you so and that is why
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam

I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine
Anytime night or day
Only trouble is, gee whiz
I’m dreamin’ my life away

I need you so that I could die
I love you so and that is why
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream

FADE
Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream



Bye Bye Love Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Everly Brothers

CHORUS:
Bye bye love
Bye bye happiness, hello loneliness
I think I´m-a gonna cry-y
Bye bye love, bye bye sweet caress, hello emptiness
I feel like I could di-ie
Bye bye my love goodby-eye

There goes my baby with-a someone new
She sure looks happy, I sure am blue
She was my baby till he stepped in
Goodbye to romance that might have been

CHORUS

I´m-a through with romance, I´m a-through with love
I´m through with a´countin´ the stars above
And here´s the reason that I´m so free
My lovin´ baby is through with me

CHORUS

Bye bye my love goodby-eye
Bye bye my love goodby-eye

FADE: Bye bye my love goodby-eye
Bye bye my love goodby-eye



Cathy's Clown Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Everly Brothers

CHORUS
Don’t want your lo-o-o-o-ove anymore
Don’t want your ki-i-i-i-isses, that’s for sure
I die each time I hear this sound
“Here he co-o-o-o-omes, that’s Cathy’s clown”

I’ve gotta stand tall, you know a man can’t crawl
But when he knows you tell lies and he hears ‘em passin’ by
He’s not a man at all

CHORUS

When you see me shed a tear and you know that it’s sincere
Dontcha think it’s kinda sad that you’re treatin’ me so bad
Or don’t you even care

CHORUS

FADE
That’s Cathy’s clown
That’s Cathy’s clown

*Oh, My Back Pages- The Film Work of Dennis Hopper- “Flashback”-A Review And A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a scene from the Dennis Hopper film, Flashback.

DVD Review

Flashback, Dennis Hopper, Kiefer Sutherland, Carol Kane, 1990

Okay, blame it on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (including “beatnik” bus driver/holdover Neal Cassady). Or blame it on a recently re-read of Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that pays “homage” to Kesey, his Pranksters, their psychedelically-painted bus Further, and their various adventures and misadventures. Or, better, blame it on Jack Kerouac and that self-same Cassady for his On The Road. Whatever it is I am in a kind of “back to the future” 1960s counter-cultural mood today. And what figure, at least in some senses, represented an aspect of that scene better than the late Dennis Hopper’s character in the classic Easy Rider. And with that introduction/justification as a prompt out of the way other Hopper efforts have come to mind, including this 1990 send-up of some of the iconic figures of the 1960s, whether they deserved that status or not. Or whether they deserved the sent-up either, come to think of it.

In the character of 1960s radical icon Huey Walker, as played by Hopper, we have a prima facie case for not, self-admittedly, deserving that status. It seems that fugitive from the law Huey needs an angle to get his (probably) massive memoir published but needs a publicity hook to stir memories (and sales). So naturally he “snitches” on himself. The plot centers gearing up the ante on that publicity in the process of law enforcement (FBI and local) trying to move Huey from point A to point B, by train no less. To give Huey his just desserts and to cap off a fanciful recapture of the fugitive radical up steps a child of the 1960s children (admirers of Huey) turned renegade FBI Agent Borden (aka Free, played by Sutherland) who, however, in end, after myriad hi-jinks, comical or otherwise, finds his way back to his DNA core. Its in the genes, right?

Along the way we are also treated to send-ups of everything the 1960s stood for, from those gaudy buses to the antics or some rueful then middle- aged “liberation fighters”, at least according to the story writers. We are also treated to a very fetching Carol Kane as Earth Mother-last of the hippie remnant- who is holding out in…Oregon (must be something in the water. Kesey slipped back there after his legal hassles were over). The rest of the plot you can see for yourselves. And you should, if only to see Dennis Hopper playing….Dennis Hopper in mid-life. He carries this thing.


Note: This space usually preaches ‘high Trotskyism” and I would be remiss if I didn’t make at least one political counter-point to round out this review on this commercially-driven comedic effort. The 1960s had more than it far share of Huey Walker figures, like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and other leading Yippies, who started out with serious standard left-wing politics and a political compass and moved, sometimes ahead of the crowd , and sometimes by being pushed from behind to a more theatrical sense of politics (to be kind). The kind highlighted in Flashback.

Well, we were young then and made every political mistake in the book, except that those “mistakes” we made even from today’s vantage point, were nothing compared to the actions of the “monsters” (led by Johnson/Nixon) that we were fighting back then. And fighting for our very lives. Against a very vicious and vindictive FBI (to name only the most well-known law enforcement agency in the mix. There were plenty of others.) The work of ConIntelPro, central to the physical liquidation of the Black Panthers and other black liberation fighters should be etched in every leftist’s brain, for eternity. In the end the bourgeoisie got off easy, and got to keep its system. We, on the other are still rolling the rock up the hill. And know who, and who was not “on the side of the angels,” then and now.

I want to finish with the one truism that struck me from the film, although I am sure that the story writers did not intend it as such. Huey, as he is in the process of “bonding” with “Free” lets the cat out of the bag- being a fugitive sucks. Not as much as being a class-war prisoner behind bars like Marilyn Buck, David Gilbert, Mumia Abu-Jamal and others today or in exile like Assata Shakur, is but it still sucks. Why? As Huey candidly stated (and as many real life political fugitives, including ex- Weather Underground leaders Professor Bill Ayers , ya, that Bill Ayers, and Professor Bernadine Dorhn can testify to) you are literally on the run, can’t make lasting friends, have to look over you shoulder constantly and, most importantly, are out of the political loop. You are down there with Huey, half-forgotten in the mist of time. And while one cannot reasonably call those who were involved in the production of what is essentially a commercial comic look at past times (and sometimes a very funny look, at that) that little point needs to be made here.