Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-As Hometown Lowell Celebrates- In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-The Be-Bop, Be-Bop Max Daddy Lives On- Jack Kerouac's Play-"Beat Generation"

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From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-The Golden Age Of The Automobile, Circa 1954

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Big Joe Turner performing Shake, Rattle and Roll.

CD Review

The Rock and Roll Era: 1954-55, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988

Joey Parker was several years older than me, maybe ten, but that didn’t stop him from letting me hang around his “garage” and watch him turn some stumble-bum wreck of an automobile that had been scrapped off some back road after some midnight “chicken run” into a vehicle worthy of a king. Worthy that is if what you wanted was speed and chicken runs and were not worried like a lot of older guys about the thing being “girl ready,” especially girl back seat ready. Then you went over to Bill’s Esso and got the thing all dolled up, amped up and perfumed up, I guess. Then all I cared about was Joey turning his wreak into speed.

Now in case you don’t know, and maybe thought I was some juvenile delinquent-in waiting, ready at age ten to plot out robberies and other mayhems in order to get my own fixed up wreak when my time came the reason I was hanging Joey’s garage was that it was located down the end of our family’s street over in the Acre in Olde Saco up in Maine and when thing s got tough at home with Ma mainly then I headed to Joey’s to cool out. Sometimes we would run around town but mainly I just hung out there with a couple of other guys my age who also had the Ma problem.

We did that for a few years until we had to start worrying about girls rather some wreaked cars but the best years were the first couple when Joey would let us watch, maybe let us hand him some tool and also let us listen to the forbidden (Ma forbidden) local radio station, WMEX, that he had on constantly. The local rock and roll radio station (although at first we did not know that term but we sure as hell knew the bounce of the music). Now around the house Ma and Dad were strictly tuned into WJDA and the old fogey World War II stuff like Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee and Frank (yes, that Frank) that drove me up a wall even before I hit on Joey’s WMEX.

I remember the first, maybe the second time Joey let me hang around (it was done mainly, as it was with the other guys, by him not saying to get lost). For some reason he did not have the radio on that morning before he started working on some 1954 Pontiac that had gotten mashed going 110 MPH over on Gorham Road in Scarborough. Once he got going though the radio came on, and not just came on but be-bop max daddy came on. I listened, listened intently swaying to the big sax beat I was crazy for then. I said who was that.

Joey. He said some n----r (it was the ‘50s remember and all hell was breaking loose down South if not in the North then but the “n” word was common enough) named Big Joe Turner and the song was called Shake, Rattle and Roll. He said Elvis had just done a version of the song much better than that. Get this though Joey might have been the Zen master of the universe with some grease in his hands but when I listened to Elvis’ version later I thought no way. To each master his own sway.

rom The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-The Snow Is Falling

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Rolling Stones performing Sister Morphine.

Rolling Stones Sister Morphine Lyrics

Translation in progress. Please wait...

Songwriters: JAGGER, MICK / RICHARDS, KEITH / FAITHFULL, MARIEANNE

(m. jagger/k. richards/m. faithfull)

Here I lie in my hospital bed
Tell me, sister morphine, when are you coming round again?
Oh, I don't think I can wait that long
Oh, you see that I’m not that strong

The scream of the ambulance is sounding in my ears
Tell me, sister morphine, how long have I been lying here?
What am I doing in this place?
Why does the doctor have no face?

Oh, I can't crawl across the floor
Ah, can't you see, sister morphine, I’m trying to score

Well it just goes to show
Things are not what they seem
Please, sister morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams
Oh, can't you see I’m fading fast?
And that this shot will be my last

Sweet cousin cocaine, lay your cool cool hand on my head
Ah, come on, sister morphine, you better make up my bed
Cause you know and I know in the morning I'll be dead
Yeah, and you can sit around, yeah and you can watch all the
Clean white sheets stained red.

Snow was falling; at least it was falling snow in his head. A childhood scene of cold New England winter heavy flakes swirling to the ground, some evaporating on contact others accumulating under the relentless driving swirls creating some classic Christmas card, some Currier& Ives sleigh in the snow scene. All of this fevered brain seen from safe inside a frosted front window, child’s nose pressed against the pane creating his own flakes in the always, always under-heated “projects” apartment where he grew up. That ramshackle old place of brothers gone to foreign parts, foreign then meaning a few miles away to schools, of parents frittering away their lives just keeping things together in their little hovel.

But it was the outside snow, or the fever-breaking thought of it just then, that kept him from going over the edge. To the place where he had been before, and a couple of times had almost not made it back. The falling off the edge right then being holed up, brain fevered, against a hot “bracero” tio taco room barely cooler than the one hundred plus degree outside in sunny summer El Paso on the Estados Unidos side of the Tex-Mex border. The falling off the edge part being holed up, as well, waiting for Dora to come back with the goods from down sunny Mexico way, down Sonora way. The falling off the edge being that he needed “something for his head” bad, bad as it had been for a while. And where the hell was Dora. It had been three days.

How he, let’s call him Peter Paul Markin to keep everybody on board, but his name was legion in those days along the Tex-Mex border and not always on the Tex side either. After he, Peter Paul, told his story about how he came to be in a sweat box tio taco bracero rooming house in dusty Mex-town in sunny El Paso in the year of our lord 1983 legion was just about right, I had heard it all before, just the particular circumstances changed with the stories, and even that not by much. His was a bad low- note tale. But he wanted to tell it, tell it all, just in case he didn’t “make it ”out of Mex-town alive. And he wanted to talk, sweat pouring off of him that no handkerchief could absorb fast enough from drinking that rotgut tequila (he never knew there were, like whiskey and scotch, gradations of tequila but when he got to Mex-Town and was waiting, snowless waiting, he learned quickly). I was there when it all got balled up for him and he had to get out of that room for a while, get away from thinking about that snow and childhood dreams. Hell, he wanted a father-confessor or something like that although god and I were not on speaking terms. If you want to listen here it is, sweat, a couple of shakes, some frayed nerves, and all.
*********
He had been nicked up, nicked up a little, in ‘Nam, ‘Nam around 1970, 1971 he wasn’t sure exactly on dates except that he was nicked up, and had the purple heart to show for it. It wasn’t a life or death nick, or it didn’t start out that way any way. Medevac got him (and a couple of buddies) out but on the helicopter to keep him from screaming his brains out the medic gave him a hit of morphine (he kept calling it sister morphine, every other word calling it sister morphine, saying look it up on some Rolling Stones rock lyrics like he had) maybe a couple before he got to the base hospital at Pleiku. Maybe a couple more hits there before they took the fragment out, maybe a couple more later when he was feeling some after effects.

A few weeks later, after some hospital time light duty, he went back on the line, not in bad shape, not enough for that precious discharge that most guys in those days were itching for as their ticket home to the “real world”except every once in a while he would get a pain for a couple of hours. He would go on morning sick call when it stayed for too long , they gave him some prescription stuff (some kind of zombie tranquilizer from the way he phonetically described the name of the drug used and after I looked it later). No go. The occasional pain persisted. He asked, innocently enough, for some morphine but they, the doctors on his case, looked at him like he was crazy. Hey that stuff is strictly for guys coming in off the line wounded, badly wounded. Bad stuff to mess around with.

Bad stuff was right. But this was Vietnam, golden triangle mystery dreams Vietnam, this was a busted up 1970s American army that had no will to fight, fight for anything except survival, buddies, and home, otherwise practically each guy for himself, and his own woes. He made a connection, a G.I. connection (he got foggy on that, on the network, conveniently foggy), an easily done deal, who made a connection with an ARVN (South Vietnamese Army soldier) and he got his “fix.” And got what he needed for the rest for his tour, cheap and no problem.

Toward the end of 1971 he was headed back stateside. He got nervous, no connections with that kind of stuff (hell, he was strictly a whiskey and beer chaser guy, drinking rotgut mainly except when he was in the chips, he from maybe a joint or two to be “hip,” back in the “real world”), and no way of making any stateside connection. Or so he thought then. After the discharge from the Army process was over he went straight to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles (he was from North Adamsville in Massachusetts but had meet a girl, a Mexican girl, a girl from Sonora, on the Cambridge Common, back shortly before he was drafted whom he had kept in touch with and who was coming up from Sonora to meet him there). He told one of the medical staff there his story and he was put (after plenty of snafus that he didn’t want to talk about because it only got him mad) in a“de-tox” unit. [Later in checking the details of Peter Paul’s story I found out that he omitted some stuff and had been shaky, very shaky on the timeline of events but basically he story checked out.] He dried out. And for a few years he was fine.

That fine included going back to school nights at UCLA, getting married to that Mexican girl, Dora Del Rios, and making small things happen in the world, his small world. Then about 1978 the pains started coming back. He knew right away the cause, and also knew that he was not going to get relief from what the V.A. (or civilians) was going to give him, those tranquilizer/pain-killer things that were worthless for his pains. He wasn’t going to live with the pain though. No way.

Here he backed up a little to tell about how he had met Dora. When he announced that intention I said it better be quick, and relevant. It was. See Dora, while a student, an exchange student for the summer at Harvard, exchanged from Sonora University down in Mexico, was on Cambridge Common the day he met her selling weed, righteous weed, for coffee and cakes (his expression for walking around money). That is how they met, strangely enough. What he didn’t know, and she didn’t tell him then, was that she had “muled” two kilos of weed on the trip up from Sonora for her brother. Her brother then being some“street” dealer looking to make the move up in that world. Those facts are germane because this Dora connection with her brother was what got him back on Jump Street (his name for “high, sister morphine high.” Dora begged him not to make her go to her brother, but after a few days of on the floor pain she relented. She made the brother connection, no problem.

At first, like in ‘Nam it was just a little something to take the pain away. Something to get him through the work day (he was a whiz at fixing computers up with software and stuff like that, tech stuff then just getting off the ground) and home to Dora and collapse. He then increased the dosage as a couple of hits weren’t enough. As he said you know the rest of the story, hooked bad, real bad. He couldn’t work (or wouldn’t, he got vague on this when he went through the timeline of his dosage increases), Dora was laid off from her job (and had to increasingly spend her time “feeding” him). She also had some vague immigration problems that he was also vague in detailing.

Then the brother “came through,” came through in two ways. One he offered to give the morphine “free.” [Of such small kindnesses civilizations decline, decline big time.] Two, the brother, Diego, wanted he/she/ they to do a little “muling” of snow, you know, cocaine (cousin cocaine he, Peter Paul, called it copycatting from the Stones lyrics) in return for his largesse. At first they balked, no way, no way in hell, but a week, maybe ten days, without sister, without another connection, and without dough, walking around dough, and they took the ride. That was few years ago and that explains why one Peter Paul Markin, shaky like a leaf, gray, sweating tequila sweat was sitting in a stinking tio taco room in El Paso waiting for Dora to come back from down Sonora way to make him “well.”

After he told his story, leaving all gray and shaky still, tequila bottle in hand, he went back to his room. A few hours later, no sign of Dora, somebody heard a persistent low moan from room, and then no sound. [Dora, I found out later, had been held up in Sonora by the Federales who were investigating the murder of her brother by a split-off rival drug gang over some mal deal] A little later that somebody who heard moans and then no sounds, knocked on his door, found it unlocked, entered and found him on the floor face down, face down. Had he been thinking of falling snow?

From The Jazz Archives-"Jazz's Secret Hotspot"-Lenox's Music Inn

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated July 8, 2012 entitled Jazz's Secret Hotspot.

Markin comment from the American Left History blog:

When The Jazz Age Was In Full Bloom- Duke Ellington At Harlem’s Cotton Club

CD Review

Jungle Nights In Harlem, Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra: 1927-1933, Bluebird, 1991

As I have mentioned in previous reviews of various classical jazz artists I came to an appreciation of that musical art from one source, and one source only- Lady Day, Billie Holiday. Along the way I started to get interested in her various back-up musicians which led me to the likes of Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Artie Shaw and others. And, of course, when you get to Johnny Hodges you naturally have to think of the Duke- Ellington that is. And there you have it, except, that I doubled, no I tripled, my appreciation of the Duke around the time of the centenary of his birthday in 1999.

And I was not wrong to do so, although the CD under review falls more into a piece of jazz history, black musical history, Jazz Age history, Harlem history and, most importantly, Cotton Club history than a source of understanding his huge place in the jazz pantheon. For those unfamiliar with that New York City venue, the Cotton Club, that is the place when all the jazz greats of the 1920s and 1930s aspired to perform- and whites, at least certain whites like those rich ones that the author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about, went to “kick up their heels”, “get their kicks”, and, maybe, get “kicked” away from the downtown squares. And Duke and his orchestra (including the aforementioned Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, and Cootie Williams among others) was the most serious feature in those days. Wouldn’t you pay big money, and gladly, to hear that sound in those surroundings? I think so.

Now, just a note for history's sake, or for the sake of a nod to political correctness. The term “jungle music” has always, as far as I know, had negative connotations about black music or black-related music like rock and roll, and still does. But, my friends, these were the terms of usage for what was going on then so accept it as a piece of history. But, also know this: do not miss out on a piece of our common history, jazz, racial, and social by missing Duke and the guys performing “Mood Indigo”, “Black and Tan Fantasy”, or “The Duke Steps Out” and the others here.