*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!    

 

 

 

 

***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now! 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized like the mass of autoworkers into unions) and others like Deportee (in serious need of a renewed hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal out of this system, it ain’t pretty), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations that has not happened again in the long “night of the long knives” since the 1970s), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart’s imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom  come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “economic royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name even one musical one today in America carrying that designation unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.”

Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new lifestyle  that could not have been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not now ) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (Markin, is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

 I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with go through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always only in our dope-flamed moments either.)

Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common when things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla America (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston and hence Maine radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil, in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was as evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.

When Girls Doo-Wopped In The Be-Bop 1960s Night

When Girls Doo-Wopped In The Be-Bop 1960s Night

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Jack Callahan never knew what his old time from high school friend Bart Webber was going to be into at any particular moment. He had been like that back in the early 1960s when he was the class cut-up at Carver High where he started the trend among students there of trying to fit themselves, as many as possible, in respectively, telephones booths (that cultural attachment connected to thoughts from waiting by the midnight phone for somebody to call to getting up the nerve to call a girl asking for a simple date and getting the frost colder that the Cold War for an answer, now long gone in the days of ubiquitous cellphones and other high-tech devices as ways of communicating), Volkswagens (the bug model also a relic of the past not the min-van which would later be ubiquitous on the highways and by-ways of 1960s counter-cultural seeking the hitchhike road), and his own personal touch to show how off the wall he could be when left to his own devices, a stall in the boys’ lavatory.           

Later, after high school and a few years on the hitchhike road going out West, he settled back down in Carver with his high school sweetheart, Betsy Binstock, who had waited for him to finish up sowing his wild oats and run a printing shop when his old employer, Len Murphy, turned it over to him after he retired. But that same sense of what will he be into next followed Bart through the years and those years with Betsy, who had merely rolled her eyes when he did holy goof stuff in high school, had mellowed him out so that what might interest him at any moment tended to be more civilized pursuits. Civilized pursuits like doing an end around (he had after all been a decent football player, good enough to catch the eyes of head cheerleader Betsy) on the films, books and music that animated his, our youth.         

He had started several years ago, maybe 2011, 2012, as he prepared to retire himself and turn the day to day running of the print shop to his son Ned, to grab some old time compilations of music, in CD form these days, from our youth at the library and then later when he had run the rack at the library on Amazon, put out by demographically savvy record companies who saw that the generation of ’68, those of us who ran riot through the 1960s had as we calmed down as much sense of nostalgia as previous generations had for the music of their youth. One night around that time at the Beachcomber in Hull, where Jack and his wife lived in a condo now that that they were “empty nesters,” over a few whiskeys, Bart had started a conversation with Jack about a compilation that he had just purchased on Amazon which featured all girl doo-wop material.     

Both Jack and Bart had imbibed as much as anybody the various gradations of music, the music of their coming of age, as rock and roll came crashing through the gates and formed the ethos from which they did not stray too much from being present at the creation in the mid-1950s (although really too young to fully appreciate what the developing ethos around rock was to be), through the doldrums of the late 1950s and early 1960s epitomized by the likes of Bobby Vee and Sandra Dee, through the British invasion and then when they traveled west to the acid-etched rock of the Airplane, Dead, Doors, that would define their counter-cultural days. Bart confessed to Jack that although he was happy with the purchase of that all girl doo-wop compilation he figured that this subgenre was probably the area that he was least interested in, or better that, he understood.

To make his point he gave Jack several reasons why that was so. Jack, in turn, suggested that he write down his sentiments and post them as a review on Amazon which gladly solicits such reviews, good or bad, as part of their selling strategy. Bart balked at first since while he may have been many things in his life he did not consider himself a writer, thought, if you can believe this that such people were holy goofs (as expression Bart, Jack and all the other guys from their corner boy days grabbed from Jack Kerouac after reading after his classic On The Road featuring the greatest holy goof of them all, Dean Moriarty, nee Neal Cassady). Jack told him to try and he would help with the editing, although he had to confess that in his long career of selling cars for Toyota (and several times being top dog, being Mister Toyota of New England) his own writing skills had atrophied since he worked on the school newspaper, The Magnet. Here is a look at what they were able to produce, although at the last minute Bart again balked and said he did not want to post the damn thing (his term) on Amazon:  

When Girls Doo-Wopped The Night Away    

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, an anachronism, a 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. I have explained that moniker put onus elsewhere to my friends so I will only say here that the ‘68 part represented a very big turning point, a kind of point of no return for the generation filled with political intrigues, assassinations, treachery and a couple of serious attempts, unsuccessful as it turned out as Frankie Jackman would say, to “turn the world upside down” to our benefit.

Naturally, dealing with the musical end of those efforts (and I will not like I did one time with Josh Breslin, a guy met out in Frisco town form up in Olde Saco, Maine and who has remained a lifelong friend, although I don’t see him as much as I like, get into our midnight quarrels about music and the revolution since that one has been laid to rest long ago) one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters (and his big ass electric mannish-child guitar sound), Big Mama Thornton (bouncing along on Hound Dog to make Elvis blush), and Big Joe Turner (who at one time with his Shake, Rattle, and Roll had been in contention, at least by me, for the first serious rock tune until I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and became a convert). And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis (who did fine work on Smiley Lewis’ Good Rocking Tonight and so can stop blushing), Carl Perkins (yeah, it was a funny twist of fate that he lost out on the big, big time when Elvis crashed out with his Blue Suede Shoes, Wanda Jackson (much underrated as a fast track female rocker before they could figure out where to put her), and Jerry Lee Lewis (is there any better song that spoke of our alienation from the old ways when he came busting into town on the back of a flatbed truck doing High School Confidential in a bust of a film of the same name.  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 (a good, a very 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, as you can tell from my comments above 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 on her parents’ demand because of his lower class upbringing, a motorcycle guy from the same wrong side of the tracks as me, a sensitive motorcycle guy who is misunderstood by a society that only sees that he is deeply alienated and could be a problem if he and his boys, the Devil’s Disciplines or whatever name they used, in their very exclusive club of hard-bitten lumpen youth decided to do what Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild One did when they wound up in some Podunk California town and wasted the place, as the lyrics in the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack attest to. Except that she, despite the goddam parents and those snickering girlfriends who just wanted to see what power the lad had behind that motorcycle if you know what I mean, wanted to be riding free in back of that bike, and you do, if you came up the way I did, 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. (Yeah, heaven despite the long list of sins he never atoned for including off-hand armed robberies to keep his bike, his bike man, up to sniff). And, maybe, just maybe, like my Betsy and me, they could be in that little white house with the picket fence hosting the grandkids today.

Try this one too for no-go for Bart, 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 around that time, mainly. I was even on the outs with Betsy then since she was dating some guy who father worked for Honeywell in the up and coming computer industry and had no time for a son of a “bogger,” son of a guy who worked in the cranberry bogs which then made the town famous. Partially because, as Jack Callahan who is helping me write this thing has felt the need to tell the whole world, again, I was something of a goof then and partially because my acne had not cleared up but when it did I did do okay with the girls (although if my long time wife Betsy sees this I am only making it up, only using a little literary license as Jack would say, okay)

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? Yeah, how would I know if it was the real thing, or just a moment’s pleasure, you know the sex thing she let her guy do, which she liked just fine, while she way letting him at her, but who afterward was having second thoughts, maybe had not resisted those teenage hormonal urges enough, 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? Yeah, but also get this while I have your ear 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.

Lafayette, Louisiana Bound-With The Good Old Swamp Boys The Hackenberry Ramblers In Mind

Lafayette, Louisiana Bound-With The Good Old Swamp Boys The Hackenberry Ramblers In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Jack Callahan

Sam Eaton was nothing but a swamp Yankee, never claimed to be anything but that, would have at various younger points in his now long life make any aspersion that he was not or that there was something wrong with that identity a cause for back alley  barroom fists and general mayhem. He, at six feet three inches and two hundred and forty pounds of mainly sinewy muscle, then could enforce that belief. Yeah, Sam had been born the son of a swamp Yankee down Carver in Southeastern Massachusetts way where there are fewer but still plenty of the breed hanging around the small cabins and cottages that partial identify kindred. His forbears going back as far as Sam was able to trace the genealogy were of that same condition, lived life close and survived to tell the tale.

A swamp Yankee for those not in the know, for those whose sense of history about the genus Yankees only extends to what you read in the bloody high school history books and goes only to knowledge of the high tone rarified Boston Brahmins is one of that breed who didn’t get his or her fair shake in the fortune, brains, good luck department and so wound up as farm hands or small hard-working scrabble farmers, fisherman if by the sea or woodmen. Those Brahmins, far removed from these brethren even in the old struggles to survive not matter how they made their ill-gotten fortunes mostly connected someway with the slave trade, now being slowly driven to distinction if not power in their secluded protected enclaves, the progeny of the Beacon Hill city on a hill crowd that John Winthrop and his Puritan crew that guys like Perry Miller a professor out of Harvard who made a big study of the breed in its entirety not always kindly brought forth on the Northeast corner of this continent were the tip of the iceberg. 

The swamp Yankees, not being the godly sort or at least not pretending to some elect, were people who came over in the later Pilgrim, vagabond, derelict criminal indentured servant migrations and got stuck or just fell into the human sink. A writer once to fill out his story of one branch of the breed devoted the first forty or so pages of his novel to a very vivid description of the set ways, the closed-ness, and the wariness of these folk in their edge of New England small town enclaves. Told about their origins back in the British Isles old country where they were loose cannons, on the run or ready to go on the run, coming in or going out of the jails and as one historian of early America, the post-Puritan period, these were master-less men. The kind that either fell into the sink holes of their towns or they drifted, and drifted is the right work, working a little especially the land until it bled out and then moved on, moved on until they ran smack into the Pacific Ocean running to the Japan sea. There at land’s end they then fell back into the human sink and developed their loves for fast cars, motorcycles and midnight hell-raising, but at least it was not cold.

You know though that these damn swampers, Sam’s kin, not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged there way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought them and theirs  every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought them down in places like Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where they tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as “boggers,” as men who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner.

Sam’s people stayed in place, kept to the edges of Carver. Sam the first of his breed to finish high school (and later some college), the first to not work the broken down bogs (more recently being sold to developers for condos), and most importantly the first to go away to that far Pacific running to the Japan seas ocean and breath in some fresh air. His people didn’t like it, some still surviving cousins still don’t, still give him an evil eye at family reunions but he broke out with his generation in the hell-bend 1960s. Learned a lot about other kinds of people but for our story he learned that the swamp Yankees formed out of the British migration to the new continent were not the only ones who developed the swamp way of thinking, entertaining themselves   and just being content with existing.

On Sam’s second trip out to San Francisco via the hitchhike highway that every other footloose young man (and some young women although they usually were travelling with a man) was using to get west, to find out what was “happening” and those quotation marks no mistake for that was the feeling of the times, he met a guy who was also from Massachusetts. From North Adamsville a town about thirty miles from Carver, a guy named Markin, Pete Markin, who had come out about a year before on the same kind of search and had wound up living in one of the then very common converted yellow brick road school buses that were running up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, searching, hell, just searching. He had met Markin in Golden Gate Park one day and Markin had invited him to come to a party that the denizens of Captain Crunch’s yellow brick bus were throwing. (Crunch the owner of the bus although he was usually not around and did not press the issue of his ownership very hard since as some of the denizens suspected on the basis of some urban legend rumor that he had exchanged a big bag of primo dope for the vehicle.)

At that party, after the obligatory passing of the joint and jug among the brethren, including Sam, Markin introduced him to Josh Breslin, who despite the surname had grown up in the Quebecois quarter of mill town Olde Saco, Maine. Josh and Sam had almost instantly gotten along since Josh’s people were what they would later jokingly call swamp Cajuns although strictly speaking the Cajuns were located in southwest Louisiana in places like Lake Charles and Lafayette heading toward Texas. Longfellow the Brahmin poet did a long poem about the travails, Evangeline. The Cajuns had been run out of Nova Scotia way back when and driven down south in a big migration after the British defeated the French in a bunch of long running worldwide wars (then worldwide which was basically wherever the British and French had outposts) but when they settled in they exhibited many of the same characteristic as the swamp Yankees around New England.

 

After Sam and Josh (and Markin of course) had been on the bus searching for whatever they were searching for several months Josh’s cousin Rene Dubois joined them. (Sam some forty plus years later had lost the drift of what he had been looking for back then when asked by his grandchildren and so he stole Markin’s line about the “search for the blue-pink Great American West night” and that seemed to satisfy them.)

Rene had grown up with Josh in Olde Saco until sixth grade when the mills that made the town run were moving south and Rene’s father who had come from Lafayette and thus had bene a real swamp Cajun had decided to move his family back to his hometown. They had nevertheless stayed in touch and Josh had convinced him to come west and see what was what. One night Josh, Sam and Rene were stoned out of their gourds (Sam’s expression) when they started talking about music, not about the acid-etched rock and roll of the Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and the Doors that they were crazy for those days but the music they grew up with.

Sam told the two others that his father would always be playing old time mountain music which he said had travelled from the old country to America and had stuck mostly with the swamp Yankees when they had their local dances or family reunions. You know plenty of fiddles, mandolins, mountain harps, hell, washboards even, whatever noise would take the miseries away for a minute. Rene had to laugh at what Sam said because his family had done the same thing except they would sing the songs in broken down French, patois they called it, he just called it Cajun and left it at that. Rene said one time his father had taken his mother, him, and his brothers over to Lake Charles to hear the Hackenberry Ramblers and just then Rene started singing a few songs in the patios. Sam smiled a knowing smile. Swamp brethren indeed. Jolie Blone. 

Juvenile Delinquent - Ronnie Allen

Veterans For Peace Statement-Free Bowe Bergdahl!

December 22, 2015

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Veterans For Peace is dismayed by the Army’s decision to charge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and endangering troops, for which, if convicted, he could potentially face life in prison.  We believe that Sgt. Bergdahl should be freed from the Army with an Honorable Discharge.

Bowe Bergdahl is a prisoner of war, three times over.  First the U.S. government sent him on Mission Impossible, to salvage its illegal, immoral and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.  Then he was captured by the Taliban, who held him prisoner under brutal conditions for five years.  Now Sgt. Bergdahl is prisoner to an orgy of militaristic politics in the most fear-mongering election year in memory.  Republican front runner Donald Trump has publicly called Bergdahl a “dirty, rotten traitor” and suggested he should be executed.

Did Sgt. Bergdahl walk away from his post in Afghanistan?  Yes, by his own account he did so, in order to bring attention to poor leadership which he believed was endangering his fellow soldiers.  Resistance to Mission Impossible takes many forms.  Bowe Bergdahl may not have been explicitly protesting against the war in Afghanistan, but by taking drastic action he sent a distress signal.
Bergdahl is charged with Desertion to Avoid Hazardous Duty, and Misbehavior Before the Enemy, which respectively, carry maximum sentences of five years and life in prison. Charging him with serious crimes in a General Court Martial appears to be a political decision.  It overrides the recommendation of the Army’s own investigating officer, who said that Bergdahl’s actions did not warrant either jail time or a punitive discharge.  The investigating officer recommended, at most, a Special Court Martial which can mete out a maximum sentence of one year in prison.

Bowe Bergdahl is clearly not guilty of desertion.  It cannot be proven that he was attempting to avoid hazardous duty or to remain away from his unit indefinitely.  The Misbehavior Before the Enemy Charge asserts that Bowe Bergdahl’s actions put his fellow soldiers at risk.  It has even been said that soldiers died looking for him.  However, no evidence has been provided to back up this claim.

It was the U.S. government that put our soldiers at risk by sending them to invade Afghanistan and to occupy it for going on 15 years.  Nearly 2,200 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, including six who were killed just this week by a suicide bomber at Bagram Air Force Base.  None of these soldiers died as a result of Sgt. Bergdahl’s actions.

Bowe Bergdahl is being made the scapegoat for the failed policies for the disastrous U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan men, women and children.

Bowe Bergdahl remains a Prisoner of War.  Veterans For Peace demands that Sgt. Bergdahl be freed immediately with an Honorable Discharge.

Veterans For Peace is also concerned about the 9,800 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan, hostages to a failed policy, with targets on their backs.  The U.S. government should withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan immediately and finally bring that long U.S. war to an end.

FREE BOWE BERGDAHL!     U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN!

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Veterans For Peace Weekly E-Letter

Fri, Jan 08, 2016 05:30 PM

If you'd like to view this email in a Web browser, please click here. Join or Renew Membership | Donate | Chapter Contacts | Online Store    Friday, January 8, 2016 Happy New Year from VFP National Staff! VFP National Plans for 2016 Back to Top Final Payment for 2016 Vietnam Tour Due By Friday, January 15, 2016 Dates of travel:  March 14 -30, 2016 Each year since 2012, members of Việt Nam's Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 of Veterans For Peace invite up to 20 veterans, non-veterans, spouses & peace activists to come to Việt Nam for an insider's 2-week tour. The Hoa Binh chapter is the first & only overseas VFP chapter of American veterans living in Việt Nam! The mission of the tour is to address the legacies of America’s war, as well as visit a beautiful country & form lasting ties of friendship & peace.  For more information, email Nadya Williams @ nadyanomad@gmail.com Back to Top Free Bowe Bergdahl! Veterans For Peace is dismayed by the Army’s decision to charge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and endangering troops, for which, if convicted, he could potentially face life in prison.  We believe that Sgt. Bergdahl should be freed from the Army with an Honorable Discharge.<Full Statement> Back to Top Army Falters In Its War Against Sexual Assault For the past two years, the Pentagon has acknowledged having a severe problem with sexual assault in the ranks. Military leaders have promised Congress, the White House and their own troops that they are redoubling efforts to protect victims and punish offenders.  <Article courtesy of The Washington Post>   Back to Top Seeking Women Candidates for VFP Board If you are interested in being a board member, please send a short resume including a statement explaining why you are interested in serving as a VFP Board member to Board President Barry Ladendorf bdlvfp@gmail.com or call the VFP National Office 314-725-6005 to speak to the Executive Director Michael T. McPhearson to answer any questions. Back to Top Travel Opportunities for Activists We will lead one final tour to the island in March 2016. Here is the March itinerary. http://cubaexplorer.com/tours/jrv/ We take just 15 people, providing an intimate chance to get to know the Cuban people and our fellow veterans Our tours are led by VFP member and Cuban documentary film maker Jim Ryerson, who has been to the island more than 25 times. jim@travelingman.net 323-436-5223 Location Sponsored by Dates Contact Cuba Code Pink Feb 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua Alliance For Global Justice Feb 20-29 Deadline to apply Jan 20th For application or questions, email Chuck@AFGJ.org Việt Nam Việt Nam's  Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 Mar 14- 30, 2016 For more information, please email Nadya Williams Cuba Code Pink May 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders May 21 - Jun 1 2016 For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org Columbia Witness for Peace Jul 20-30, 2016 For more information email or call:  Patrick Bonner:  323-563-7940  pkbonner@earthlink.net Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders Jul 16- 29 2016 For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders Oct   24-Nov     6 2016 For more information email esiegel@ifpb.org Back to Top In This Issue: Happy New Year from VFP National Staff Final Payment for 2016 Vietnam Tour Due By Friday, January 15, 2016 Free Bowe Bergdahl! Army Falters In Its War Against Sexual Assault Seeking Women Candidates for VFP Board Travel Opportunities for Activists Fundraising Opportunity for VFP Chapters! The Golden Rule Peace Ship Presentation at Ocean Beach Green Center SALE! Limited Supply of 2016 Syracuse Cultural Workers Peace Calendars at Reduced Price Member/Chapter Highlights Save the Dates:  Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Fundraising Opportunity for VFP Chapters! Over the next four months, musician Tom Neilson will be traveling coast to coast, putting on fundraising shows for local peace organizations. Tom is willing to perform free of charge for VFP chapters, to help them raise funds. Any interested chapter should reach out to Tom. Shows are being offered first come, first served. Tom's current calendar can be viewed on his website.  Back to Top The Golden Rule Peace Ship Presentation at Ocean Beach Green Center When:   January 13th  7pm Where:  Ocean Beach Green Center               4843 B Voltaire Street               Ocean Beach 92107 For more information email oceanbeachgreencenter@gmail.com or call   619.225.1083 Back to Top SALE! Limited Supply of 2016 Syracuse Cultural Workers Peace Calendars at Reduced Price Reduced Price - $10 Includes: 200 people's history annotations 44th edition Holidays for many faiths Lunar cycles, 13 native moons Buy Today! Back to Top Member/Chapter Highlights VFP Leader and Vietnam Combat Vet, Russell Brown, walks 165 miles for Peace.  <Article> VFP San Diego Chapter 91 member, Dave Patterson submitted a review of the book, Command and Control by Eric Schlosser.  <Read book review> Indianapolis Chapter 49 will hold a celebration of  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on January 18, 2016.  <Details> Back to Top Save the Dates:  Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Jan 18, 2016 - MLK Day Mar 27- April 2, 2016 - Shut Down Creech AFB Apr 15 - GDAMS (Global Day Against Military Spending) Apr 22 - Earth Day May 14-21, 2016 - Sam's 5th Annual Ride for Peace, Raleigh, NC to Washington, DC May 30 — Memorial Day (Observed) Aug 11-15, 2016 - VFP Annual Convention at Clark Kerr campus of University of California Berkeley, CA Sep 21—International Day of Peace Nov 11 - Armistice Day Back to Top Did you know? VFP Board of Directors will hold its 1st meeting of 2016 in Washington, DC - January 22-24