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
Riding With The King-The Music Of B.B. King-And Eric Clapton
CD Review
By Zack James
Riding With The King, B.B. King, Eric Clapton
“You never know where music, the muse of music if that is the right way to say it, if it is not redundant is heading in this strange old world” Seth Garth said to his old friend Bartlett Webber one night when they were discussing various musical trends and commitments over a few drinks at Friday’s in downtown Boston. Seth had just been commenting on the hard fact that the guys and gals back in the 1960s who were holding up the blues traditions of the quintessentially black musical form which had been eclipsed in the 1950s by the strong current of rock and rock of which it was a legitimate forbear were mostly then younger whites. They had gotten their baptisms of fire in one of two ways not mutually exclusive. One, Seth’s way, was through what he called the folk minute of the early 1960s when a lot of young people who were coming of social and political age were tired of the vanilla rock and roll that they were hearing on the radio and were looking for roots music. And one of the keys to understanding roots music was looking southward to the black blues traditions coming out of the plantations and juke joints in the Delta and other places.
That was not just happenstance since some of the folk aficionados headed southward to “discover” if there were any blues guys and gals left (there were from most famously Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James to Sippie Wallace and a whole lot more). The other later trend, which was actually happening at the same time over in England but did not become known here in the States until as part of the British invasion of rock groups (the Beatles and Stones mostly) we found out that those groups were being spoon-fed (read: covering) the seemingly passe blues greats of the 1950s like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. They worshiped at the feet of the old bluesmen including a trip by the Stones to the Mecca, Chicago. Thus that “worship at the feet” was no mere expression since as august a group as the Rolling Stones made their way to Chicago, made their way to legendary blues label Chess Records, made their way to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Seth went on, “You know with very few exceptions, maybe in the old days guys like Taj Majal and more recently Keb ‘Mo young blacks were running away from the “blues is dues” contributions of their forbears, except the hip-hop artists who were savoring those blues as backdrop to their new language experiences.” Bart nodded his head not so much because he was as knowledgeable as Seth about musical trends, he wasn’t, but because ever since Seth had turned him on to various non-rock and roll forms of music such as these blues and folk music scenes when they were searching for something in high school he had deferred to him on such subjects.
That deference to Seth had also not been happenstance since for early in his journalistic career starting with the American Folk Gazette when he was still in college he had been a music critic most frequently and profitably before it folded long ago when the ebb tide of the 1960s faded for the prestigious The Eye. Moreover although Bart was a true aficionado Seth would be the one to lead the way forward musically ever since the old days back in Riverdale when Seth had been the guy who turned the crowd they hung around with on to that folk music that was coming over the horizon. He would take the lead here as well ever since both men had attended a concert at the Garden by Big Bill Bloom, the legendary folksinger from the 1960s. Both men had agreed to walk out of the performance before the encore as a protest to the hard fact that Big Bill could no longer sing, was practically talking the lyrics through. That experience got Seth onto the trail of an idea. He wanted to check out all the singers still standing from back in the day who were still performing and rate them on the question of whether they still had “it.” As it turned out some did like David Bromberg and his band who burned up the joint one night in downtown Boston. The late Etta James and Utah Phillips didn’t, didn’t have it. And so the quest.
That quest was now centered more particularly on the fading fast few blues masters still around. That is where Seth began to see that break in the black blues tradition as two generations or more removed from Southern country life or hard inner city industrial madness which had brought a couple of generations north in search of a better life and the music needed to pick up as well bringing forth the whole electric blues scene that hummed cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1950s. That brought them to this-B.B. King and Eric Clapton, one of those British invasion guys from back in the 1960s were going to perform together at the Garden in a week or so. [This concert a couple of years before B.B passed in 2015] .
At the concert Seth and Bart had been apprehensive when they saw ancient B.B. and his latest version of Lucille being escorted to a seat on center stage with Eric Clapton to the side. Not to worry though the work they did was a great success. Seth mentioned to Bart though that he was not sure where the new generation would get their blues from and hoped they would never go away just like rock and roll once guys like Eric passed away. This CD was their work for future generation to feast on okay.
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
********** Workers Vanguard No. 1007
31 August 2012
How Marxists Combat Religion
(Quote of the Week)
Writing in 1909, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin presented the Marxist understanding that religious beliefs and backwardness can only be overcome by eliminating the material conditions that foster them.
We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extraordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc.... No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.
—V.I. Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” May 1909
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
********* Workers Vanguard No. 1007
31 August 2012
Defend the UC Davis “Banker’s Dozen”!
(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below an August 14 leaflet issued by the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club.
In November of last year, the world watched as University of California Davis (UCD) cops attacked a group of seated Occupy student protesters with pepper spray, treating them with the disdain of an exterminator spraying cockroaches. On March 29, eleven students and one professor, most of them victims of the November police assault, were slammed with charges that could send them to prison for nearly eleven years and result in $1 million in fines.
Last January, the UCD Occupy protesters had begun a sit-in at the campus branch of U.S. Bank against the “university’s privatization” and “its collusion with corporate profiteers.” After nearly two months of sit-ins and other actions by dozens of protesters, U.S. Bank closed its branch on February 28. It dropped its $3 million deal with this public university after complaining that UCD did not dispatch campus police, or allow the bank to use its guards, to remove the protesters. Weeks after the bank closed shop the district attorney—who reportedly colluded with the same UCD cops who were involved in the November pepper-spray attack—charged the “Banker’s Dozen” with 20 counts each of “obstructing movement in a public place” and one count of “conspiracy.” Drop all the charges immediately! Cops off campus!
The outrage of the students is entirely justified. Once almost free, annual tuition and fees for California residents at the University of California have more than tripled over the past ten years to over $13,000. Job prospects are dismal to say the least—according to a Rutgers University study, over 40 percent of 2010 college graduates couldn’t find employment by spring of 2011. The Spartacus Youth Clubs demand: Open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all! Nationalize the private universities! Abolish the student debt! Capitalist institutions like U.S. Bank are undoubtedly benefiting from the nationwide budget cuts and tuition hikes, which force students to shackle themselves to mountains of debt that will weigh them down for decades after they graduate.
But it is the capitalist system as a whole, not individual banks, that is responsible for these attacks. The capitalists do not see education as a right; they see education in terms of investment vs. returns. Universities are training grounds for the administrative, technical and cultural personnel needed by the capitalist system. In general, the ruling class will spend only as much money on education as it thinks is necessary to maintain its profits. In the midst of the worst recession in decades, spending money to educate the sons and daughters of the working class and poor seems like a waste of money to these bloodsucking parasites whose tremendous wealth is based on the exploitation of the working class.
An April 23 “Statement by Some Banker’s Dozen Supporters” argues that the charges against the protesters are “an abuse of the legal system and a waste of our county’s already limited resources.” But this is exactly what the legal system is for: to protect the property rights and interests of the capitalists and their banks. The bourgeois state—which consists at its core of the police, courts, prisons and military—is an instrument of capitalist rule, not a neutral arbiter standing above society.
The fundamental role of the administration is to serve as the representative of the capitalist class within the universities. It is not a matter of the “over influence” of money in politics or in education; the banks don’t have to bribe UCD Chancellor Katehi to serve them any more than a fish has to be bribed to swim. The administration and the state work together to quell protest against the depredations of this brutal and decaying system. That is why Katehi gave the green light to violently clear out the protesters in November and that is why she embraces the persecution of the Banker’s Dozen, making the chilling statement on April 27 that “the students involved in this case will learn from this experience.” Abolish the administration! For worker/student/teacher control of the campuses!
Many students, however, have illusions that the universities—and indeed capitalism itself—can be reformed into putting “people before profits.” These illusions can be as blinding as pepper spray and just as dangerous. While the bosses have in times of class struggle been forced to offer cheap or even free higher education, these gains are always reversible as long as the capitalist system remains intact. In diametrical opposition to Occupy’s program of liberal, bourgeois populism, the SYCs seek to win young activists to the understanding that this system cannot be reformed. It must be smashed and replaced by a workers state.
The UCD protesters have shown courage and determination in the face of draconian state repression. But like all students, they have no direct relationship to the means of production and therefore no real social power. By contrast the working class—those whose labor produces and transports all of the goods and services in society—can bring the capitalist system to a grinding halt. The capitalists can send their cops to repress and terrorize the workers and students, but it is the workers whose labor keeps the factories running and the profits flowing. If students are to win their battles against the rulers’ assaults on public education, they must look to the proletariat. This struggle could find support among the workers, who are being ruthlessly squeezed in the vise of austerity.
As the youth auxiliary of the Spartacist League, the SYCs fight to win youth to the program of international workers revolution, which will replace the capitalist system based on production for profit with a centrally planned, collectivized economy. In such a system the resources of society will be rationally directed to provide for the needs of humanity, including universal employment and free, quality, racially integrated education for all. To do this, the efforts of workers and their student allies require the leadership of a revolutionary proletarian party, which is what we Marxists seek to build.
Defend the Banker’s Dozen! Drop all the charges! The next court hearing is currently scheduled for August 24 at the Yolo County Courthouse, 725 Court Street, Woodland, CA. To contribute to their legal fund, visit: davisdozen.org. Send protest letters to: District Attorney Jeff W. Reisig, 301 Second St., Woodland, CA 95695, fax (530) 666-8423.
As The Burns-Novick Vietnam War Documentary Airs-Iris Dement's "There Is A Wall In Washington"
Frank Jackman comment: Sometimes, and this is one of those times, a song can say as much about a war as a ten-part eighteen hour series in just a few minutes. Not the only poignant song about the effects of the Vietnam War down at the base, down where people who fought, died, or died a thousand dies live-and still do but a good one, a very good one.
An Encore-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, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, 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 “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.
The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later 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. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)
It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he 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. Madame that day 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 dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill outGypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths 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 once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, 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 his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics 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 by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told himthey were if approached the right way). No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.
That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, 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 in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break 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 a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations 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” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, 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 for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also 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, Markin, 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 did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe 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 Markin 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 whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , 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 grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence 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,” Breathless or At The Hop, 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 now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.
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 that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). 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 out and where 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, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before, 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 own 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 had 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 job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, 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, after they 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 after giving up their "slave" names.)
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 lonely 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 had 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 out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters 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 shorter 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 had 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 down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam 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 in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.
For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-A Working Class Anthem For Labor Day- " Solidarity Forever"
A YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger, appropriately enough, performing old Wobblie songwriter Ralph Chaplin's labor anthem, Solidarity Forever. A good song to hear on our real labor holiday, the holiday of the international working class movement, May Day, but even today on this country's consciously competing holiday.
If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round At 83
Those urban locales were certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.
Yeah, came barreling like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than lost loves and longings.
Rosalie Sorrels could write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me at those moments)
Rosalie Sorrels as one would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night-yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels
Solidarity Forever Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! For the union makes us strong When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong. They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold; Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the Union makes us strong. This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)
All Eyes Are On Frog
Pond Golf Course This Weekend
By “Sports Editor” Si
Lannon
[This site has not
generally over the past several years given much space to sports at any level.
You can get all the sports you want at plenty of locations and on all kinds of
media 24/7/365and then some. We did attempt several years ago to provide space
for Larry Rodgers now with the on-line Sports
At A Glance during a couple of college football seasons with his
predictions about the placement of the top 25 teams in the big-time football
area but with the coming of a truncated version of the playoff system (still
based on some Top 25 formula to pick the final four top teams for the two-round
playoff) a lot of the steam (and fun) of picking the Top 25 any given weekend had
gone out of that effort.
Si Lannon, normally a
guest film critic and occasional music one as well is a nut for golf if you can
believe that of an adult man, a very adult man, in this day in age. An
otherwise mature and solid citizen chasing after a little white ball that never
did anybody any harm in order to put said ball in a hole this size of a coffee
cup. And they say that destruction of perfectly good grasslands, sandy beaches
and a harmless fetid pond or lake passes for fun among a certain set. Si asked,
no, begged, me to let him have a go at a short piece concerning a local club
tournament that he was interested in writing about to stretch out his range he
was bold enough to tell me. His winning argument though, a surprising one, a surprising
one when he told me the number of people chasing white balls that did nobody
any harm, was that some twenty-five million Americans give up rational thought
at least once a year to play the game. Here is your shot at glory Si. Fore! Peter
Paul Markin]
Forget
Mayweather-MacGregor (after all a tightly-wired ready to spring professional
prizefighter, a pugilist, should beat some sorry street tough with kickass legs
hands down), forget Warriors-Cavs (after all how hard is it for nine feet tall
guys to bump into a fruit basket placed ten feet above the parquet), forget the
Super Bowl (of whatever Roman numeral after all they are only playing to kill
time between commercials), forget the World Series (after all how hard can it
be to hit a 95 mph fastball to the heavens), forget the Stanley Cup, (yes
forget it since I don’t know a damn thing about the game except most of the
guys should do three to five years not minutes for their thuggery), and forget
holy of holies, the four golf Majors (after all how hard is it for guys to go
begging hat in hand to FedEx, Audi, Firemen’s Insurance, et. al for a nice
paycheck for finishing tied for 26th in some goof tournament). Yes,
forget all those “fake news” sports because this weekend, this weekend as sunny
summer begins to turn autumnal (nice word, right) in New England all eyes will
be on the Frog Pond Golf Course nestled in the sleepy Hollow Village section of
post-doctoral heavy Cambridge for the annual winner-take-all four-ball team net
club championship.
For those not in the
know either about golf or various ways to pass the time like four-ball this
format begins with the qualify round to winnow (nice word again, right) the
field down to sixteen two-man teams (it could be distaff members as well but
none appeared in the lists this year) who were able to hang on after a
nail-biting eighteen holes of best ball (the best score by one of the members
of the team counting on each hole) using eighty percent of each team member’s
handicap (for example a 30 handicapper, a high handicapper, would get
twenty-four strokes toward the team’s net score, not gross, that is for those
professional players waiting in line for their hand-outs). Those sixteen teams
go mano a mano against one another in match play (for example the number one
team goes against number sixteen and so on) with the loser eliminated until
third week when the final two teams standing fight a battle to the death for
the justly coveted and well-deserved championship. Again for the unknowing the
treacherous uphill road to victory once the teams square off will be based on
the handicap of the best player in the foursome. For example if twenty is the
lowest handicap then, say, a twenty-four handicapper would get four shots in
tow for the match. Those would be determined by the four hardest holes on the
course as listed by the scorecard. Say a player on one team gets a five but
“gets a stroke on the hole” which means four then that person would win the
hole if say each opponent had a five. If they had four then the hole would be
halved-no blood. This madness, and some days it is shear madness that would
ensnare even the best minds at Apple or Microsoft, goes on until the eighteen
hole unless the match is shortened once a team cannot win. Say a team is down
three with two holes to go-done-the match is over and the losers get to hang
their heads low and try to avoid eye contact with others out on the course so
they don’t have to publicize their abysmal defeat on that long endless road
back to the clubhouse and further snarky looks from the flea-bitten denizens
around the clubhouse bar most of whom did not make the qualifying cut.
Get this, unlike those
beggarly professionals each participant forks over twenty dollars US (or its
equivalent in pounds sterling, stray Euros, francs, no that is no longer
current, pesos, silver, spare change or Monopoly money, should that last one as
the name of a game be italicized). And the sixteen qualifying teams get to fork
over ten dollars US for a cash pool (or its equivalent in pounds sterling,
stray Euros, francs, no that is no longer current, pesos, silver, spare change
or Monopoly money, should that last one as the name of a game be italicized). Simple
except for that eighty percent stuff that requires a handy computer to figure
the numbers especially when you have a decimal involved. That and the unspoken
eternal vigilance necessary to make sure the opponents who are capable of any
crime up to and including murder, murder most foul in their misguided quests
for glory play by the rules. (We will leave the rule book for the aficionados
and move on.)
The first round of
matches begin on a cold granite gray early morning Sunday at normally placid Frog
Pond (where beside the dissolute seemingly homeless golfers you can find
misbegotten dog-walkers screaming at their charges to behave, pitiful ancient
joggers plodding along about three miles an hour and assorted younger health
nuts doing bizarre twists and turns on the leafy tree-lined road adjacent to
the golf course) but I don’t really give a damn about those so-called mano a
mano matches since the two teams I have decided to feature here should have
“walk-overs.” What I want to look at is the “prelim”-the match-up between the
two teams which should meet after a grueling three weeks in the final pairing.
Come brisk Saturday morning all eyes will be upon the team of Robert and Kaz pitted
against Zhou (no relation to the late former Chinese foreign minister I don’t
think although maybe that team could use some of his luck since Zhou reportedly
was never on the losing side of a faction fight inside the Chinese Communist
Party which took some doing) and Sand-Bagger Jackson. The battle of the century,
the clash of the titans, the fight to the death for glory and fame hardly are
superlatives enough to describe this impending show-down.
On the face of it, “off
the form” as they say in horse racing (that’s another forget sport while I am
at it-how hard is it for fast horses to run fast and what of it) this practice nine
should be a “walk-over” for the first named pair. Robert-Kaz under the
leadership of what more than one commentator has called the redoubtable
Monsieur Roberge the mercurial Kaz shot his best round of the season as that
team won the very lucrative qualifying medal and the number one seed (hence
facing the number sixteen team and thus “walk-over” is an appropriate way to
name the other team’s fate. Moreover the wily Frenchman (via Quebec) Robert is
coming off a sparkling fourth place performance in the well-regarded City of
Cambridge Quota tournament (no, not immigrants in sanctuary city Cambridge but
a complicated to the novice format based on total points which need not be
explained here now) and Kaz (nobody seems to know how to get pass those first
three letter orally or in writing and so universally Kaz) had a very
respectable semi-final finish in the individual net match play club championship
earlier in the sun-bleached summer. For the other team Zhou had won a match
play format in the spring but everybody knows that is ancient history come the
fall and the hapless Sand-Bagger is coming off a lackluster tie for fourteenth
in that aforementioned Quota tournament and has been a bust all season. (A
couple of seasons ago to show how easy it is to fall from the mountain top
Sand-Bagger was being favorable compared to Byron Nelson, he of the record
eleven straight PGA championships, when he was winning everything in sight but
that too is ancient history in the “only as good as your last round” world of
competitive golf. The scuttlebutt in the club house then among the touts, con
artists and junkies swapping lies around the ancient highly polished mahogany bar
was that Sand-Bagger would have to play all future tourneys with a single club-
a nine iron. Yes, how the mighty have fallen.)
Still I am willing to
bet six, two and even that it is not wise to count old hard-bitten warriors
like Zhou-Sand-Bagger out. I’ll put my money where my mouth is and bet a fiver
on that proposition.
The Intellectuals Next
Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of
Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
The Petrified Forest,
starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, from the play by Robert
E. Sherwood, 1936
The 1930s were a tough
time all around. Tough for hungry mouths and wandering nomads during the Great
Depression that sucked all the everyday air out of society. Made a lot of crazy
things happen like the rise of right wing populism, you know, the Nazi,
fascist, nationalist, ethnic cleansing crowd who wreaked havoc on an
unsuspecting world then and their grandchildren and great grandchildren are
prepping up for a revival here in the early part of the 21st
century. It was a time of retreats, mostly, certainly a time of retreat for the
intellectuals, at least those intellectuals who believed that something close
to human perfection with the rise of the machine age to create greater leisure
and time for thoughtfulness could happen before the millennium. They got those
hopes battered first by the deeply disturbing horrors of World War I which decimated the
flower of that generation and then by the popular reversions to blood and soil,
allegiance solely to the tribe and the struggle of the survival of the fittest
(this time not with clubs but with guns and death-wielding high tech
destruction capacities). The film under review, the adaptation of the Robert E.
Sherwood play The Petrified Forest set
in, well, the ancient Petrified Forest out in Arizona when only the hearty (or
weary) survive takes a candid look at the defeat of the intellectuals and the
disturbing reemergence of the survival of the fittest doctrine writ large and
writ in a way that old Charles Darwin would have been horrified by back in the
1930s.
The plotline is
simplicity itself when you think about it. Alan, a disillusioned vagabond
intellectual, a writer, played by Leslie Howard, kind of drifting along in a world
that he no longer recognizes as his home finds himself in a diner on the edge
of the forest where a bright young writer-painter, Gabby, played by Bette
Davis, is wasting away as a waitress in her father’s business and daydreaming
about heading to France to be reunited with her cultivated mother. Problem: she
has no dough or nobody give her the dough and so she stagnates out on the edge
of the world. He, and she, immediately
sense they are kindred spirits but there in those times nothing that could be
done about it. Additionally Alan has had all his dreams punctured and he is just
playing out his string.
Enter Duke Mantee,
played by rising new start Humphrey Bogart, a deadeye gangster who is on the
run from every police agency in the area for having created every possible act
of murder and mayhem in his time. He holds the denizens of the diner captive
awaiting some frill to meet him there before they head south of the border.
While he is waiting Alan hits upon the bright idea that the best way that he
can help the smitten Gabby is to have Duke kill him so that Gabby can claim his
insurance policy and start a new life. After some off-hand negotiations Duke
agrees to do the job. No sweat off his brow, all in a day’s work. When the
coppers come to get him Duke does his dastardly deed while using some
customer-hostages as human shields to get away. Alan symbolically dies in
Gabby’s arms knowing that his act, his gesture, will insure her future. Insure
maybe, just maybe that the next time the world turns in on itself in a fit of
hubris that the intellectuals will not retreat like he did. Yes, the
intellectuals next time.
From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance
Workers Vanguard No. 1104
27 January 2017
TROTSKY
LENIN
No to Unity with Class Enemy!
(Quote of the Week)
Today, the reformist left calls for “unity” to fight against Trump. This boils down to uniting behind the Democratic Party, political representatives of the class enemy. Writing in 1918, as the German Revolution was unfolding, revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht warned against the dangers of unity with those defending the capitalist order. Liebknecht, along with Rosa Luxemburg, belatedly split with the socialist conciliators who wanted to unite with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had betrayed the working class by supporting German imperialism during World War I. In January 1919, shortly after founding the German Communist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces at the behest of the SPD government and the revolution was defeated.
Unity! Who could yearn and strive for it more than we? Unity, which gives the proletariat the strength to carry out its historic mission.
But not all “unity” breeds strength. Unity between fire and water extinguishes the fire and turns the water to steam. Unity between wolf and lamb makes the lamb a meal for the wolf. Unity between the proletariat and the ruling classes sacrifices the proletariat. Unity with traitors means defeat.
Only forces pulling in the same direction are made stronger through unity. When forces pull against each other, chaining them together cripples them both.
We strive to combine forces that pull in the same direction. The current apostles of unity, like the unity preachers during the war, strive to unite opposing forces in order to obstruct and deflect the radical forces of the revolution. Politics is action. Working together in action presupposes unity on means and ends. Whoever agrees with us on means and ends is for us a welcome comrade in battle. Unity in thought and attitude, in aspiration and action, that is the only real unity. Unity in words is an illusion, self-deception, or a fraud. The revolution has hardly begun, and the apostles of unity already want to liquidate it. They want to steer the movement onto “peaceful paths” to save capitalist society. They want to hypnotize the proletariat with the catchword of unity in order to wrench power from its hands by reestablishing the class state and preserving economic class rule. They lash out at us because we frustrate these plans, because we are truly serious about the liberation of the working class and the world socialist revolution.
Can we unify with those who are nothing more than substitutes for the capitalist exploiter, dressed as socialists?
Can we, may we join with them without becoming accomplices in their conspiracies?
Unity with them would mean ruin for the proletariat. It would mean renouncing socialism and the International. They are not fit for a fraternal handshake. They should be met not with unity, but with battle.
The toiling masses are the prime movers of social revolution. Clear class consciousness, clear recognition of their historic tasks, a clear will to achieve them, and unerring effectiveness—these are the attributes without which they will not be able to complete their work. Today more than ever the task is to clear away the unity smokescreen, expose half measures and halfheartedness, and unmask all false friends of the working class. Clarity can arise only out of pitiless criticism, unity only out of clarity, and the strength to create the new socialist world only out of unity in spirit, goals, and purpose.
—Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace’” (19 November 1918), printed in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (Pathfinder Press, 1986)
