This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
A
Good Man Is Hard To Find-With Blues Singer Alberta Hunter In
Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Josie Davis had to admit, had to
finally admit, that she never had much luck with men, never had much luck at
all as she sat there in her bedroom cleaning out the stuff he had left behind,
the stuff that would have tied him down as he fled the scene. It was not as
though she had started out life with man trouble, certainly in high school and
a little in big amorphous college at Wisconsin she had had her pick of good
guys, guys who brought gifts, guys who didn’t mind picking up the check
although that trend was going out of fashion a few years back in the 1960s
before women were expected as part of their liberation to pick up previously
male dinner bills. Guys who made her laugh, guys who provided her with dope for
a good time, guys who knew more than her in the sex department and she a quick
learner that way caught on fast.
But it seemed that once she left
Madison the male hunters always turned out to be less than they looked like, a
lot less when it came right down to it. She knew she had never been a great
beauty although guys who wanted to get next to her would flower her with such
praise, knew though that what one guy, Max, sweet old Max from Sociology 101 class
she wondered where he was now having dropped out of school to go “find
himself,” called her, fetching, meant that her prettiness, smarts and pleasing
personality meant that she would not have to spent too many lonely nights by
some midnight telephone. But her run of luck seemed to sour out of the friendly
confines of some campus, soured when she came to Boston to make her mark in the
world, the world of sociology where she would begin her advanced degree
programs, including a nice stipend as an intern (along with the inevitable
family treasury back in Manhattan supplementing that nice stipend, nice as far
as academic stipends went, which would not pay for extras like clothes, trips
home and away, and that car that she just absolutely needed to get to her
clinical sites.
Take Jack Donovan, an Irishman who had only been in the country for a few
years when she, curious about the night life in Boston ran into him at the
Plough and Stars in Cambridge a favorite watering hole for the ex-pat Irish
fleeing the turmoils in the old country. She, a Jewish girl from Manhattan via
Hunter College High School, had fled that overwhelmingly sad city for Madison
and now Boston, had been intrigued by his accent and by his winsome manner and
although she knew nothing about his Irish heritage having been immersed in finding
her own Jewish identity of late she had decided to take the ride, decided to
see where things would lead. And for a while they were great, a few months of
going out several nights a week to the Plough or some other Cambridge bar, lots
of laughs and lots of singing, good times and pretty good sex.
Then the other shoe kind of dropped which Josie, the queen of sociology and
so supposed to know something of human nature in the raw should have seen it coming,
he lost his job down at the docks where he had been an alternate (a B-man he
called it) but there had been plenty of work which suddenly dried up and he
began to drink more heavily, lost his room on Beacon Hill and moved in with
her. Got more morose as he could not find work, working class job work since he
had left Cork without a diploma. Then the beatings started, at first just a
belt to the shoulder or someplace soft and hidden but it hurt and she thought
it was just his frustrations a not having a job and basically living off a
woman although he never articulated that way. Then he belted her in the eye and
she had had to stay in the house for a few days while the swelling went down
and she was embarrassed when she went back to work and her girlfriends quizzed
her about the residue black and blue around her eye and of course she lied,
lied and said she had hit her eye on the eternal door. Said to herself that he
hadn’t meant it, hadn’t been himself and for that one forlorn minute asked herself
what would she do without him, how before he had loved her so. One night in a
rage, loaded to the gills, smelling of vomit and whiskey he pummeled her which
required her to go the hospital where she had to make a report, a police report,
and while she did not want to be the reason Jack went to jail (and would later
be deported after building a criminal record) she had no choice, she did not
want to go on that way, for love or not.
Josie was shy around men for a while, didn’t want to get involved, hell, afraid
to get involved after the Jack incidents but she like a lot of people needed
intimate relations with a man and so one day her friend Susie (one of the
voices she listened to when deciding that Jack would wind up a bum and who
knows what would have happened to her) introduced her to a guy whom she had
known back in college at New York University, Jeff Goldman, whom she hit it off
with right away since they had cultural, ethnic and musical interests in
common. Jeff had told her from the beginning that he lived on Long Island and
so would only be able to see her when he came to town on business, or when he
decided to take her on some whirlwind weekend in some secluded resort where
they would have a great time. She really did think that she was onto a guy who
would treat her right, 100% right. Then the other shoe dropped, again. Jeff
started making excuses for why he couldn’t see her, said he had business in
Chicago, was making deals that required his serious time just then. When he
called from Chicago or Los Angeles Josie would hear muted voices in the
background and at first did not think anything of it but after three
consecutive brush-off weekends she started to think he was having an affair
with another woman and that she had better head for cover. She did not know how
right she was when Jeff did finally come by to see her and after they had made
love she and he had fallen asleep she fished through his wallet and found a
photograph of his wife and two children smiling in front of their large Long
Island home. Adieu, Jeff.
During Josie’s studies she had worked as an intern at Harvard University
for the famous Doctor Samuel Potter, academically famous anyway, who was the
king hell king of the latest trends in sociology. He had never paid much
attention to her since he was bedding Susie, another intern, Josie’s closest
friend in Boston and was preoccupied with that hellion (Susie’s term about
herself) until either he broke it off or Susie sensing that he was smoking way
to much dope, doing too many lines of cocaine the new drug of choice among
hipsters around Cambridge saw the writing on the wall but he then honed in on
Josie. (Later Susie confided in Josie that it was because the dope was making
him a lousy lover and she began seeing an old boyfriend again who could deal
with her urges.) Josie was betwixt and between about Sam because she really was
ready to be off men for a while, wanted to get that dissertation she was about half
way through done but he began to make it clear that she had better pay
attention to him if she wanted any kind of career in the profession. This in
the days before such behavior against female subordinates would have had said
professor in front of a very big carpet complete with rack, and maybe a noose.
So she dabbled with the good professor, took his threats seriously until one
day after she had not seen him for a week Susie called and told her on the QT
that Professor Potter had flipped out on some hell-bent mixture of dope and hubris
and had been checked into posh McClean’s
Hospital in Belmont until further notice. Josie’s reaction, after all that had
happened to her, was that felt sorry for him, hoped things worked out. (They
didn’t as the family held him in seclusion for a number of years afterward and
Josie was not quite sure what had become of him except that he was no longer
the king hell king of the latest trends in sociology.)
A half a dozen years later now safely in the profession, now with the name
doctor in front of her name and after having at most had a few dates with men,
nothing substantial, nothing that would have led anywhere she met the human dynamo,
Peter Grogan, a financier he called himself when she had met him at Jack’s
where she occasionally stopped for a solo bar stool drink before heading home.
That dynamo part was right since he swept her off of her feet with the force of
his personality. Maybe it was just her time to get back in the ring but she
fell hard for him like some drunken sailor. Here’s where things went awry
though Peter kept insisting that he could set her up with a nice institute, a
place where she could do all the research she wanted. He just needed some dough
to tide him over on a deal and could she lend him some thousands to close the
deal. She, the fool, took his words as good coin and lent the bum the dough.
And lent more money a couple more times until her account and stocks were
almost depleted. Then she was away at a conference in San Francisco and let
Peter use her place while she was gone, for a business deal he said which
couldn’t be concluded at his office, or his home. When she came back from
Frisco the whole place had been denuded of every saleable item, and too boot Peter
had tried to sell the condo she owned to some poor snook who gave him a $5000 down
payment. When they caught up with Peter in Rhode Island it turned out the only
financing he was doing was financing various losing horses at local race tracks
with whoever’s money he could grab (well over a quarter million dollars at
least from those who were not too embarrassed to keep quiet about their loses).
Yeah, Josie sighed as she bundled up Peter’s debris to be thrown away in
the garbage with her love, a good man is hard to find, very hard to find.
Railroad Shorty Catches The Westbound Train-With Townes Van Zandt Brazos River Song In Mind
Tacoma Tommy and Platte River Knobby,
as the men closest to him in a world where close associations were as fleeting
as rolling up your bedroll and heading out in the early morning burn off fog,
laid old Railroad Shorty out along the Brazos about a mile from their old
railroad jungle camp along the old Texas & Western tracks just where the
river bends which provided clear running water for the camp and provided old
Shorty with a fine view resting place, a place he always talked about so that
is where he would lay now for eternity. The boys laid him out as best they
could, put a little half-ass cross made of small twigs gathered from the
spreading oak tree which would give Shorty some shelter over the shallow grave
they had dug for him for they were unskilled at such endeavors and moreover
were as hungover as two skunks, maybe dug enough to keep the scavengers away
maybe not, just in case he was a Christian and wanted it that way. Funny in the
hobo, tramp, bum worlds and there were very serious distinctions recognized by
all among those three classes of brethren (ironic even down in the fellahin
world such populations would divide just like regular society) except when some
soup line missionary workers, usually the blessed damn Sallies (Salvation
Army), wanted you to repent along with your soup, no man spoke much about his
religion so old Shorty could have been a Mohammedan or an atheist for all
anybody knew. As far as they knew while Shorty may have been on the con with
the merciful Sallies to get a few bucks or a bed for a week or so when he was
sick he never bought into that old time religion stuff, never did like Sky-lo
King did and join the bastards without a murmur banging some silly drum around
Christmas time pan-handling the gentle folk for dough for the missions.
All Tommy and Knobby knew was that
morning when they tried to awaken Shorty as they usually did since he would usually
be up until all hours, quiet like, sipping that old Tokay he loved when he had some
change, he had not responded, had caught the freight train west like a lot of
travelling men before him. Guys like Big Bill, Lefty, Arfy Darfy, Frankie
Machine, Prince Love, Black River Sam and a hundred other monikers some used over
and over again, some used by different men and used for a purpose for it was
far better to be some anonymous Cactus Mack than use your given name in case
some surly ex-wife, some crazed repo-man or some rat-bait sheriff was looking
for you heard you were headed west. Usually a guy would thinking he would only
be on the bum for a few weeks, maybe a month, would use his given name but all it took was one close
call by some vengeful ex-wife who had hired a private detective to run you down,
or even hear of such exploits to wise up and get a respectable moniker.
All they knew as well was that the only
proper burial for a hobo and Shorty qualified in spade for that title since in
the doomed fellahin kingdom a hobo like Shorty not afraid to work if necessary,
if only for a bottle, even if he wasn’t making a profession out of what he was
doing like “pearl diving” was ahead of tramps who avoided work and bum who
under no conditions would do such labor was royalty and that distinctions carried
weight even in camps where tramps and bums could hang for a while, was to get
the body away from the railroad jungle and buried before the police or some
authority came snooping around asking who he was, did he have family, did he
leave anything of value behind like hobos had some treasure trove to be
distributed upon taking that forlorn west-bound train. All that noise, all that
law for a simple unadorned vagrant burial in some town’s potter’s field. Both
men agreed no thank you Shorty was better off against the banks of the Brazos,
the banks of any river, down in any arroyo, under any railroad bridge if it
came to that than to be in some numbered no man ‘s graveyard.
Their hot sweaty work done Tommy opened
up a pint bottle of old rotgut whisky, Old Tom, Old Tom that has probably
killed more men than the plague, certainly more denizens of the jungle camps, Shorty’s
only valuable possession at the end, and took a swig for Shorty and then passed
it to Knobby who did the same. As they started to reminisce for a moment about
Shorty Knobby asked Tommy how old he thought Shorty had been, roughly anyway.
Tommy answered that he figured about fifty but you could never tell with hobos
because the weather, the booze, the irregular and usually awful food, even the Sally
fare depended on what some local grocery store had thrown away and these mercy-benders
were no cooks whatever else they could do in life, and the living conditions
aged a man quickly out on the road. Tommy asked Knobby how old he thought he
was. Knobby said sixty and Tommy answered with a blush beneath his wind-burned,
tanned, wind-burned again face and said forty-five. That ended that line of
inquiry and as they took another swig each for Shorty they talked about the
deceased and how he was always a straight-up guy.
Tommy could remember that first time he
set eyes on Shorty out in the Gallup, New Mexico railroad jungle out along the
Southern Pacific tracks outside of town a few years back as Shorty welcomed him
with a fresh swig of Ripple wine, all Shorty had at the time. See Shorty was
one of the original founders, you might say, of that camp at that site (there
was an older site near Kingman in Arizona but the local sheriff and his boys busted
that up one night just for the shear hell of it and the local citizenry stood
by and applauded as they “threw the bums out of town”). So Tommy and Shorty
went back a ways, a pretty long time as far as travelling men goes, and when Shorty
and some Tex-Mex named Diablo Fuego had words and Shorty decided if he wanted
to avoid a shiv some dark, moonless night he had better head out, head east
this time to the Brazos Tommy had grabbed his knapsack and bedroll and headed
out with him (that knapsack or rucksack and a bedroll with ground cover all a travelling
man had to call home. Everybody, well
except maybe Diablo but what can you expect of a Tex-Mex, had a good word for
Shorty since if he had dough, had food, had hustled an extra package of
cigarettes, and most importantly, if he had booze, he shared. (That was the rationale
the boys used for taking Shorty’s Old Tom to themselves rather than burying perfectly
good whisky with Shorty which was an old tradition among certain Western hobos.)
You might hear from some guys from the
cities, college kids, folksingers or troubadours, guys who spent maybe a forlorn
couple of days doing research or something talk about the camaraderie of the
road, the “honor among the brethren, among thieves” maybe says it best but
don’t bet on it, don’t leave a bedroll, a swig of Thunderbird wine, hell, even
a cigarette butt around without keeping two, maybe three, eyes on those items
or that will be the last you see of them. But Shorty was a master hobo, held a
high degree in that railroad kingdom. Just then Knobby though he heard some car
coming up the road so they hit the road back to camp and left Railroad Shorty,
name unknown, age unknown, place of origin unknown along the sweet Brazos never
to cross that river, the Trinity, the Pecos, the Colorado, the Platte and a
hundred other rivers no more. RIP, Shorty, RIP.
When Girls Doo-Wopped In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- "The
Best Of The Girl Groups- Volume 1”- A CD Review
Click on the headline
to link to a YouTube film clip of the Shangri-Las performing Leader
Of The Pack.
CD Review
The Best Of The Girl Groups, Volume 1, various artists, Rhino Records, 1990
I have, of late, been running back over
some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that
ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that
kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and just fine, agreed),
and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay
homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama
Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from
Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I
have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led
by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (good
question, right). I note that I have not done much with the female side of the
doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s
and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes
in popular music. I make some amends for that omission here.
One problem with the girl groups for a
guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, is that the lyrics for many of the girl group
songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy can a young
ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer
have for a girl who breaks up with her boyfriend, a motorcycle guy, a sensitive
motorcycle guy, on her parents’ demand because of his lower class upbringing as
the lyrics in the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack attest to. Except that
she should have stuck with her guy through thick and thin, and maybe, just
maybe, he would not have skidded off that rainy road and gone to Harley heaven
so young. And, maybe, just maybe, they could be in that little white house with
the picket fence hosting the grandkids today.
Try this, the lyrics about some guy,
some sensitive, shy, good-looking guy with the wavy hair who all the girls are
going crazy over but who the singer is going make her very own in boy and girl
love battle in the Cliftons’ He’s So Fine when this writer was nothing
but a girl reject, mainly. Or how about this one, the one where the love bugs
are going to be married and really get that white house picket fence thing in
the Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love for a guy who, again, more often than not
didn’t even have steady girlfriend. I, kiss-less youth, won’t even get into the
part of the anatomy that Betty Everett harps on in It’s In His Kiss. Or,
finally, how could I possibly relate to the teen girl angst problem posed in
the Shirelles Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Ya, how would I know if
it was the real thing, or just a moment’s pleasure, and what that dreaded
tomorrow they sing about will bring.
So you get the idea, this stuff could
not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Ya, but also get this you
had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop
bopped into that good night voice out and listen to, and sing along with, the
lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was about our teen angst, teen
alienation, teen love youth traumas and now, a distant now, this stuff sounds
great.
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 my 1950s growing up time and which I 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 but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music and 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 when they let it all hang out.
Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, before 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. Count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.
On January 15, 2015, the #Somerville18, a group of Pan-Asians, Latinos, and white people, some of whom identify as queer or transgender, stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by temporarily blocking the I-93 highway in Massachusetts. The demonstration called for the end to racial profiling, incarceration, murders, and other forms of police violence against Black people in the United States and beyond.
Click on image for a larger version
Now District Attorney Ryan has decided to harshly retaliate against the #Somerville18 with criminal charges and outrageous restitution fines for exercising their First Amendment rights, which guarantee freedom of expression. The #Somerville18 believes DA Ryan's excessive punishments reinforce a nationwide intimidation tactic to suppress demonstrations, particularly those in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Take action now to stand with the #Somerville18 and push back against the criminalization of demonstrations in Boston and beyond. Tell DA Ryan that 90 days jail time, 18 months probation, and $14,580 in restitution fine are unreasonable punishments for demonstrations. DA Ryan's hostile punishments set a dangerous precedent that restricts civic participation and violates First Amendment rights. Tell DA Ryan to drop the charges now!
The Reverend Jason Lydon and several other clergy and ministers recently sent a letter to DA Ryan urging her to drop the charges against the 18.
DA Ryan can be reached at the phone number for the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, 781-897-8300.
Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To TheChapel Of Love In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America.
It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer anything like that back then, could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve, read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for Gypsy Anne at the Skee game which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute one you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked now acre, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) And Edward did win her a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics (and “copped a little feel”) down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look. No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, not then when the hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while.
That big breeze blowing through the land thing was not Edward’s idea anyway but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley, who read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late (for the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was nine o’clock night and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that one-horse town (expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, including Edward’s where he first heard the words).
Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend (unknown since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a resident professional academic sociologist in residence and Markin was picking his stuff up from newspapers and magazines who were always way behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.
Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward had to chuckle though at the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox. He used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him. But he was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grape vine news in the town and whom everybody deferred to so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie” which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning about.
That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music (what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that) that had passed for rock. Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.
More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground. But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung and families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.
He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.
That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.
One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.
Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.
So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.” So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).
Then came 1964 and Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.
That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid. Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:
“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his conference trip, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by.)
Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.
And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat” except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).
Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way just like now.)
Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."
And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:
“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little longer than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester. And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."
Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)
They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and have purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck though, young travelers, good luck.
Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated the better angels of their natures have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town).
One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed). Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own if they got out of line).
Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact.
The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.
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No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.
The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not felt they needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
