***Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee And The Battle Of The Sexes-Round 236

 YouTube film clips of Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee performing.

Patsy Cline: Greatest Hits, Patsy Cline, MCA Records, 1991

Sometimes one cannot win in this wicked old world. A few years ago, after some serious prodding bordering on violations of the Genera Conventions against torture which certainly, now in retrospect, warrant further investigation, further criminal investigation, I was asked by the chairperson of my North Adamsville High School Class 1964 (ouch!) Reunion Committee to answer certain questions about my likes and dislikes back in the day. The alleged purpose of this exercise (other than to see if we were still youthfully sharp) was to compile a survey /sketch of class life in the long ago misty 1960s. There was, moreover, a certain method to her madness that I did not catch onto as quickly as I should have if I had had my proper "forget high school days" guard up, as she probed by stages.

If you know something about interrogation techniques this may sound familiar. She started off with easy stuff. You know like favorite sports (easy, as a participant, running, maybe running scared, if that is a sport, but, more importantly, as a spectator our beloved raider red and black-bled football team which held even me in thrall as they ground it out on the gridiron on those granite grey autumn Saturday afternoons yelling myself, and not just me, hoarse), favorite teachers (the usual suspects, a bevy of hard-bitten, hard-nosed, grindstone-touting English and history bugs), favorite school lunch (none of the above but I should have become more suspicious with that question because I, and I know others from the class who even now refuse, refuse on principle, to have anything to do with pizza in the sixty-six guises that passed for lunch five days a week, sometimes as American chop suey even). She then worked her way into more intimate stuff like personal tastes in music. Obviously after she reeled us in, such a profound question required answers, especially for those of us who considered ourselves nothing but unabashed children of rock and roll.

But she devised even more malignant tricks as she unfolded her CIA-like probes. She posed the questions very specifically and asked what she probably thought we would think was an innocuous question: in your youth did you prefer The Rolling Stones or the Beatles? Innocent, right? Pick one or the other. I did and went on and on about how the Stones lit my flamed-out youth on fire, how I came to the blues via their cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s (really Willie Dixon’s) Little Red Rooster (banned in Boston, moreover, that made it just that much more appealing) etc. ,etc.

Are you with me so far? Then, out of nowhere, or at least nowhere for a child of rock and roll, she asked about this combination- the Brenda Lee versus Patsy Cline shoot-out. What, are you kidding? I cavalierly dismissed the notion of either singer having the slightest influence on my budding manly rock persona and refused, purposefully refused, to answer (okay, okay I put N/A). No big deal this is America after all and N/A is part of the democratic tradition if frowned upon by partisans. End of story.

Not though when my "significant other" (known in the old days, in polite society, as my paramour and in impolite society as...oh, well you can fill in the blank) finished reading my response (I had off-handedly shown it to her for some laughs). The gist of her indignant argument centered on my alleged testosterone-driven choices of male Rock 'n' Roll bands like the Stones to the exclusion of kinder, gentler music-in short, choices that women might prefer. Okay, I took the point and then made my female singer selection. Naturally, I need to make a little comment to motivate my choice.

Frankly, like I said, I really do not remember being a fan of either Brenda Lee or Patsy Cline in my youth. Both names are associated in those high school memories with dreamy school dances or other types of romantic endeavor. It was not until several years ago that I came to appreciate Patsy Cline's work. I have always been a sucker for female torch- singers like Billie Holiday and the young Peggy Lee in her Benny Goodman period but Patsy only recently became part of my musical interests as a country "torch" singer.

Frankly, on the face of it Patsy Cline would not have fallen under my idea of a torch singer back in the day. That is, until you heard that voice coming out of the past to chill you to the marrow with her heart-rending renditions of some very classic country and crossover ballads. For those of us who came of age in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s this was the music at the high school dance where you got to ask that guy or girl that you had your eye on for that slow dance that gave you time to talk and feel out the situation. A retrospective thanks, Patsy. This two CD set contains so many classics it is hard to know where to begin but I counted at least 20 that you need to listen to. That, my friends, rather says it all. Classic Hank William tunes like Your Cheating Heart, Willie Nelson’s Crazy, others like He’s Not You and She’s Got Him. Wow. A few non-ballad novelty type songs could have been leave out and done no damage but when you look at the overall package. Again, WOW.

One last word. My last word. Let me get back to that controversy with my "significant other" (I prefer "soul-mate" but I will let that pass here). I mentioned in that hard-nosed class reunion questionnaire that in the summer of 2005 I attended a Rolling Stones concert at Fenway Park. Now who do you think was standing beside me shaking, as the kids say, her "booty" for all she was worth? So much for that testosterone theory. Moreover, who imprisoned me in Fenway Park practically at gunpoint, until I bought her a sassy little Stones T-shirt as a memento of the occasion? Enough said.

***********

Here Are Some Lyrics For Brenda and Patsy So You Can Make An Informed Decision On These Burning Questions Of The Day.

Brenda Lee - I'm Sorry lyrics


Lyrics to I'm Sorry :

I'm sorry, so sorry
That I was such a fool
I didn't know
Love could be so cruel
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Uh, oh
Oh, yes

You tell me mistakes
Are part of being young
But that don't right
The wrong that's been done

Spoken:
(I'm sorry) I'm sorry
(So sorry) So sorry
Please accept my apology
But love is blind
And I was to blind to see
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Uh, oh
Oh, yes

You tell me mistakes
Are part of being young
But that don't right
The wrong that's been done
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Uh, oh
Oh, yes

I'm sorry, so sorry
Please accept my apology
But love was blind
And I was too blind to see
(Sorry)

She's Got You Lyrics

Artist: Patsy Cline

I've got your picture that you gave to me
And it's signed with love just like it used to be
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got your picture, she's got you

I've got the records that we used to share
And they still sound the same as when you were here
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got the records, she's got you

I've got your memory, or, has it got me?
I really don't know but I know it won't let me be

I've got your class ring that proved you cared
And it still looks the same as when you gave it, dear
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got these little things, she's got you

I've got your memory, or, has it got me?
I really don't know but I know it won't let me be

I've got your class ring that proved you cared
And it still looks the same as when you gave it, dear
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got these little things, she's-got-you

***Out In The Two-Timing Femme Fatale 1950s Crime Noir Night- “Armored Car Robbery”- A Review

DVD Review

Armored Car Robbery, starring Charles McGraw, William Talman, Adele Jurgens, RKO Radio Pictures, 1950
Forget what I ever said about the classic two-timing femme fatales. And who knows maybe three-timing, or more. Once you go down that road what is to stop a dame, any dame , and why, at any small number when you are looking, forever looking, to step up in class, to latch onto the big dough guys who will take you out of the dime-a-dance scene you are mired in. So forget frails like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon who was ready to make any guy, any two guys for that matter, take the fall as long as she got her damn bird, and the stuff of dreams. With dough enough to keep her in style, and the small-time grifters off her back. Forget Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai who had half the male world, the smart guys too, lining up to take the fall, and just ask where to take it until in the end even the smart guys cried “uncle.” Forget Jane Greer in Out Of The Past twisting up every guy in California, some smart guys too, and guys who supposedly knew what was what wound up hiding out until the coast was clear, maybe for about a century hiding out nursing their wounds , once she got done with them. And forget one more, just one more, that no femme list is complete without Ava Garner trying to get some guy, her everlovin’ husband no less, some supposedly badass guy, to take the fall for her on his deathbed in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. Yah, forget them all as just slightly nervous misunderstood frills that had a couple of bad breaks along the way. Sweet little Yvonne (played by Adele Jurgens. Yah, I know, the name doesn’t exactly ring bells in the fatale world, good or bad)in this sleeper of a crime noir under review, Armored Car Robbery (Yah, I know as well, they seemed to have run out of interesting titles on this one) puts them all to shame. I might be over- touting the thing but hear me out.

Naturally no femme fatale worth her salt is driven by anything but the desire, the very strong desire, to get out from under whatever menial labor she is stuck doing, from serving them off the arm in some hash house to beating drunks for drinks and donuts in some two bit-bar fly scene. Yvonne here is strictly an independent operator working her fanny off (no pun intended) as a stripper ( maybe today the more politically correct term would be a sex worker, or some other more exotic description, although I am willing to stand corrected on that) in a low-rent Chicago burlesque house. Naturally such places, as Damon Runyon, Studs Terkel, and a few other guys have informed us, do not draw serious high-rollers or serious smart guys. So, through this and that, Yvonne winds up married, unhappily married as it turns out, to Benny who is nothing but a small-time grafter down on his uppers as the film opens. Strictly from Jump Street and strictly a guy who takes orders, not gives them.

And that is where this film gets interesting because while Bennie is nothing a but small-time hood he knows a certain smart guy, Dave Purvis (played by William Talman, probably better known as the ever-losing District Attorney in the 1950s Perry Mason television series and not a classic ladies’ man by any means which means he too has to keep grabbing dough), who has a plan, a big heist plan, which the reader can figure out from the title of the film, involves robbing, well, an armored car. Why? As the late old time yegg Willie Sutton has often been quoted as saying in all kinds of contexts –“that’s where the money is.” Big half a million dollar dough (big 1950s dough, now just tip money for the big guys). Bennie (and a couple of his confederates) are in, in to get out from under in the Yvonne department, to keep her in style, some style anyway. But here is the beauty of the thing, and what puts Yvonne right up there with the more well-known fatales, she is running around, married to Benny or not, running around no questions asked, with one Dave Purvis. See Yvonne knows what every true-blue two-timing femme fatale knows-go with the brains of the operation. And so her fate is set.

Of course even a kid wet behind the ears knows that the magic mantra behind every crime noir is that crime, well, crime doesn’t pay. The only difference usually is in what manner it doesn’t pay (and how bad the femme fatale makes some guy, or guys, fall). Here the heist gets blown by a simple call to the police by a witness. The stick-up (at a ball park during baseball season which is probably a separate chargeable crime itself ) is blown but not before a fatal shoot-out of a police officer in pursuit. Benny also gets shot-up in the melee. And that is where Lieutenant Cordell (played by ruggedly handsome, jut-jawed, and straight-as-an-arrow Charles McGraw with the perfect police officer’s face) comes in to see some rough-hewn justice is served. See the officer killed was his longtime partner and as we already know from private detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon a guy has to do something about the murder of his partner, private or public cop. From there it is only time before Dave and Yvonne, once Benny expires from his wounds, are cornered in a dramatic airfield shoot-out. But here is the clincher- when Dave earlier, dough in hand, told Yvonne that Benny had gone to his just rewards she showed all the emotion of one who heard that a fly had been swatted dead. Didn’t I tell you she was poison? Yah, I did.

***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-A Paen To The Great Amercian West Night- Happy Trails To You  

 

 
A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

 

…in no particular order- for all the wretched wranglers, for all the cowpokes, for all the chuck wagon chucks, for all the black-hatted desperados, for a the stinking braceros, for all the injuns (okay, okay Native Americans), for all the buffalo soldiers, for all the discharged Civil War soldiers who went west, for all the scouting parties, for all the city slickers who had a dream, for all the saloon barkeepers charging too much for whisky, for all the outlaws turned sheriff, for Billy the Kid, for the James boys, for the Lone Ranger, for Geronimo, for the wagon parties that did, or did not make it, for Brigham Young and his golden tabernacle boys, for the cattle ranchers, for the sheep ranchers, for hardy pioneer women, for the hearty hookers, for the dance hall girls, for the silver miners, for the gold miners, for the Iowa farmers pulling up stakes, for the immigrant tinhorns, and for that lonesome cowboy, hat tilted against the winds, saddled up and riding herd…  

…for the all the mesas, for the Grand Canyon, for Tombstone, for Denver, for Flagstaff, for Salt Lake City, for rockymountainshigh, for the high desert, for the arroyos, for the ravines, for the Red River (and the Sabine), for the Rio Grande, for Mission Viejo, for Ogala, for Pine Ridge, for the Black Hills, for the Colorado River, for hotter than hell Needles(California), for Joshua Tree, for Los Cruces, for White Sands, for the Comstock Trail, for Pike’s Peak, for Fort Worth, for Cheyenne, for Big Sky country, for Reno, for Winnemucca and for blessed Pacific Ocean …        

… for bringing firewater to the injuns (oops, Native Americans) for building the Grand Coulee Dam, for setting speed records at the Bonneville salt flats, for cattle rustling, for sheep stealing, for playing with marked decks, for the OK corral, for making Buffalo Phil (oops Bill) a national icon, for Ms. Annie Oakley too, for traversing the Colorado River, for setting up all those Spanish missions with the sainted names, for six-shooters and guys to shoot them, for the transcontinental railroad routes, for taming the wild west, for Larry McMurtry, most definitely for The Last Picture Show, for cranking all those fossil fuels out of the good old earth (although you can stop now, okay), for barbed wire fences, for wild boy cowboy rodeos, for Tex, Mex music, for Tex Ritter and ten thousand sainted cowboys real and televised, for this whole jumble of good and bad persons, places and things that have made the West, and for the search for the great blue-pink American West night and done …             

**********

Lyrics to "Happy Trails" by Dale Evans Rogers

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again.

Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It's the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here's a happy one for you.

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again.

*********

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin

 

 

     

From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96^th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the State Church

Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution

Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010

In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

For New October Revolutions!

(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.

The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.

* * *

Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....

Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.

1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.

2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.

3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.

4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.

5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.

To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:

6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.

7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.

But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:

8. The Bolshevik Party....

In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.

It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.

Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.

In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.

Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.

The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....

Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.

Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.

But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.

—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)

**********

Workers Vanguard No. 1009 28 September 2012 TROTSKY LENIN The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the State Church (Quote of the Week) Shortly after the Bolshevik-led October Revolution, the Soviet government stripped the Russian Orthodox church of its state sanction and vast property holdings. An initial step toward rooting out religious reaction and promoting atheism, the decree printed below was part of a thoroughgoing effort to remake a society steeped in rural backwardness and the heritage of tsarist oppression. Such steps were later undermined by the Stalinist bureaucratic caste that, beginning in 1923-24, usurped political power and threw out the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary-internationalist program. In 1943, the same year the Communist International was officially liquidated, Stalin’s regime gave state recognition to the Orthodox church as part of its promotion of Russian nationalism in the war against Nazi Germany. 1. The Church is separated from the state. 2. Within the confines of the Republic it shall be prohibited to issue any local by-laws or regulations restricting or limiting freedom of conscience, or establishing privileges or preferential rights of any kind based on the religious creed of citizens. 3. Every citizen may profess any religious belief, or profess no belief at all. All restrictions of rights, involved by professing one or another religious belief, or by professing no belief at all, are cancelled and void. Note: All reference to the professing or non-professing of religious creeds by citizens shall be expunged from all official documents. 4. State or other public functions binding in law shall not be accompanied by the performance of religious rites or ceremonies. 5. Free performance of religious rites is permissible as long as it does not disturb public order, or interfere with the rights of the citizens of the Soviet Republic. The local authorities shall be entitled in such cases to adopt all necessary measures for maintenance of public order and safety. 6. Nobody is entitled to refuse to perform his duties as a citizen on the basis of his religious belief. Exceptions to this rule, on the condition that one civic duty be replaced by another, may be granted in each individual case by the verdict of the People’s Court. 7. The official taking or administering of religious oaths is cancelled. In necessary cases merely a solemn promise is given. 8. Births, marriages, and deaths are to be registered and solemnized solely by civic (secular) authorities: marriage and birth registration offices. 9. The School is separated from the Church. Instruction in any religious creed or belief shall be prohibited in all state, public, and also private educational establishments in which general instruction is given. Citizens may give or receive religious instruction in a private way. 10. All church and religious associations are subject to the ordinary legislation concerning private associations and unions. They shall not enjoy special privileges, nor receive any subsidies from the state or from local autonomous or self-governing institutions. 11. Compulsory collection of imposts and taxes in favour of church and religious associations, also measures of compulsion or punishment adopted by such associations in respect to their members, shall not be permitted. 12. No church or religious associations have the right to own property. They do not possess the rights of juridical persons. 13. The property of all church and religious associations existing in Russia is pronounced the property of the People. Buildings and objects especially used for the purposes of worship shall be let, free of charge, to the respective religious associations, by resolution of the local, or central state authorities. —“Decree on the Freedom of Conscience, and of Church and Religious Societies,” 20 January 1918, printed in Mervyn Matthews, ed., Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies (Taplinger Publishing, 1974)

WV 1009 28 September 2012 · Imperialists’ Hands Off Syria! · Marikana Miners Win, Strike Wave Spreads South Africa · COSATU Congress: Bureaucrats Burn Literature Supporting Striking Mineworkers · “Tough on Crime” Anti-Death Penalty Measure Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Vote Yes on California Prop 34! · FBI Raids Target Northwest Activists (Young Spartacus pages) · The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the State Church (Quote of the Week) · On Critical Support to KKE (Letters) · Darwin and Marx: Correcting the Record (Letter) · Judith Szathmari-Lécuyer 1944–2012 · Correction · Syrian Civil War: Legacy of Imperialist Divide-and-Rule · Dialectical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Rationalism A Marxist Critique of the “New Atheists” Part Three · Workers Vanguard Subscription Drive · Leon Trotsky on “The Future of Man” (Young Spartacus pages)

 

***Out in the 1950s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye -The Book

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s crime novel, 1953

Recently I did a review of the Robert Altman film adaptation of this Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe crime novel of the same name where I mentioned that you would be hard pressed to understand the film character without some background about Chandler, and about Marlowe. That applies here as well. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day, back before the 1930s when they made a splash on the scene, on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

[Hammett, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Sam, who come to think of it like Marlowe, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, although not an assortment of Hollywood women but one, one dame who had him all twisted up, almost, up north in Frisco town.]

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes. Or noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.

The list of such descriptive language goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown buildings on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down on your fragile head. (That spill your guts thing, by the way a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of doing, except when it suited his purposes. No cop or gangster could force anything out of him, and they tried, believe me they tried. ) He had come from them, from the cops, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Windowreflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny-ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s code of honor.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.

And now this book. Yah, too that Terry Lennox was a piece of work alright, a guy from Yonkers or some place near New York City so he had to be tough, street smarts tough. Yah, who also knew all the angels, good and bad liking the bad if he was to call a preference, knew all the angles, and knew how to cut corners on both, knew those corners more than one way too as Marlowe found out, found out. later. And still liked the guy, or at least wished him no harm. Marlowe had met him in a bar, Shorty’s, the original Shorty’s over off Wiltshire to set your geography straight, down the street from his apartment building. Shorty’s the bar that he had make famous, or infamous as the case may be, in the Baxter case, the bizarre one where an old time king hell fixer took a fall after a guy got shot by another guy right in the place over a decade before, just before the war in Europe got up a head of steam. Shorty, now a prosperous owner of several watering holes, including the Club Arriba over on Central Avenue, once he knew whose palms to grease and who to seek “protection” from, liked Marlowe’s presence as a crowd-drawer and for the favor his drinks were on the house. Marlowe, in the chips or not, never turned down a drink, scotch especially, from friend or foe so the place was his regular hang-out

It had been a slow Monday late afternoon when Terry walked in, sat down beside Marlowe, and ordered a scotch bright, scotch, high-end scotch in his case, with a kick of rum, a drink that the guys who had come back from overseas brought back with them. More importantly that was Marlowe’s drink of choice at that moment. He off-handedly commented on the similar tastes and Terry told him about how he had acquired the taste in London during the war. And so they talked, talked about the drink, talked about the late war, talked about the craziness of Los Angeles lately although Marlowe could tell Terry was neither native nor had he gone native, talked about the big migration after the war that had stretched the place to the limit and they were still coming, and about this and that, guy stuff, manly guy stuff.

Every few days, maybe every week or so, they would run into each other, Terry always parking his ride, his Jaguar, right out in front helter-skelter depending on how heavily he had been drinking, and discuss stuff, guy stuff, mostly. Terry doing the talking, fast-talking with a little edge, with a little larceny, wise-guy, angle-cutting edge to it, and Marlowe served as the listening post and eventually he would have Terry over to his place after the bar closed for a nightcap, many nights to sleep it off on Marlowe’s couch as well. A lot of what Terry would talk about was how tough it was being married to money, big money, married to the Wyatt fortune, or part of it, the Laura Wyatt part of it. That was old California money, old meaning built by grabbing water rights back in the 1920s, getting in on the ground floor of the oil boom around the LaBrea fields and whatever else old Leslie Wyatt could grab that was not tied down. A real bastard Marlowe had heard but a real lamb to his kids, especially Laura who early on was wild, wild as plenty of money would go. Terry could take the money part, take it easily with both hands out having grown up poor, dirt poor in Yonkers before the war. But the way they, Laura, the old man, and their Mayfair swell friends made him feel like cheap street left ashes in his mouth. That was one angle he had not figured out he told Marlowe one drunken night, not yet.

Worse this Laura was nothing but a tramp picking up every fly-by-night guy she took a momentary fancy too, bringing him home, or rather to her “guest house” where she might be holed up for a few days before coming up for air. Hell, he would say that he really should have had no kick since had met her at one of her Malibu parties which he crashed with a friend and he had spent his own few days in that guest house. A few days later they were married, a lark for her and easy street for him but it still bothered him, bothered him that she was so open like only the rich could be with her minute affairs. And so Terry, Terry the trophy war hero (he had been a “premature anti-fascist” fighting in the Spanish Civil War in an International Brigade unit although more for the three squares and some dough than any political allegiance and later as a volunteer commando with the British when Europe heated up, and where he was was severely wounded on a secret mission) began to fall off the leash.

Terry the reclamation project too (Laura made it clear she was taking a poor kid from the streets and giving him dough, a car and some manners, public manners anyway), began to lead his own life, began to play around, play around with a loose woman or two who was dissatisfied with her husband or who just liked to play around in that insular little world of 1950s Malibu, Malibu before all the riff-raff and hang- ten surfers came through. Thereafter he began to drink heavily (and grab a few lines of off-hand cocaine if it was laying around), began to drink himself into a stupor to ease the pain, the pain of his youthful wants, his war wounds, and his social wounds. After a while, after a few months of talk, couches, and drunks Marlowe considered Terry a friend, a rare distinction for a lone- wolf private detective. And Terry considered Marlowe a friend too.

So it was no big deal when Terry came up to Marlowe’s apartment one midnight several months after they met, drunk, frazzled, a little shaky and asked Marlowe to drive him to Mexico, Tijuana just over the border, to think things out, undisclosed things. Terry wanted no questions asked and once Marlowe accepted that condition, actually had thought nothing of it except the trip down south was unusual previously it had been places north of L.A. to see some woman or to drive him home, he bought the ticket and gave him that ride. A fateful ride that would cost Marlowe a few days in the slammer for aiding a felon after the fact since what Terry was thinking things out about was the brutal murder of his wife, Laura. Once the coppers tied Marlowe to Terry’s disappearance, and it wasn’t hard because Marlowe had not tried to hide his tracks, they gave it to Marlowe strong, gave him the full-press third-degree like they like to do anytime they get a private dick in their clutches. Especially Marlowe who had twisted their noses on the Sternwood (the time he rounded up Eddie Mars, the big gangster, and put a big bow around his neck) and the Trepper (where he exposed a murderous crooked cop) cases, made them look foolish, a few years before.

Then just as quickly as Marlowe was sprung from jail without an explanation. No, that is not right, there was no more case since Terry had saved everybody a lot of trouble and committed suicide, leaving an incriminating note. So long Terry, end of story. No, no again, Marlowe was not buying the whole set-up both because he did not believe that Terry could have brutally murdered his wife no matter how much he hated her tramp ways and her snobbery and that high-end life they led and because Terry just didn’t seem the suicide type, didn’t appear that distraught when he left him off at the border. Marlowe figured that he could not have stayed in his profession very long if he was not able to take the measure of a man, could not size him, could not have a grip on what made him tick, and didn’t. No, with all his sorrows, all his hurts, all his baggage from his youth Terry was made of tougher stuff.

But there was nothing Marlowe could do about checking further having been warned off the case by Laura’s father who wanted the thing closed, closed tight, so he could maintain his privacy, keep the case off the front page so that his country club set would have nothing to titter about. Told all this by Wyatt’s lawyer, naturally. And since old man drew a lot of water downtown he was prepared to make life tough for one Philip Marlowe. Warned off too by a couple of Terry’s old friends and war buddies, Mendy and Randy, whom Terry had worked for before he hit pay- dirt with Laura and who were also then very prominent mobsters with connections back East. Not heeding such warnings from hard guys, guys who had cut their teeth in the cutthroat black markets of wartime Europe, were in on the ground floor when the fight over who, or who would not, run Vegas, and who would think nothing of sending some, what did Mendy call him, oh yeah, a two-bit gumshoe, down some secluded ravine was not good for business. And then there were the cops, the cops responding to pressure from downtown, their own dislike for Marlowe and his profession, and their own sense of power who said in no uncertain terms the case was shut, shut tight. So although Terry’s fate gnawed at him he backed off, backed off for a while, although not because some high-priced lawyer, some two-bit soft guy Vegas hoods, or some on- the- take cops said to but because he was broke and needed to make some dough, needed to make office and room rent.

With Terry still in the back of his mind Marlowe grabbed his next case, the Waits case, the case of a famous abusive drunken pot-boiler historical novel writer, Roger Waits. Everybody, even Marlowe, had heard of Waits of course, the sword and busted bodice novel guy whose books you would see at the check-out counters at supermarkets and who sex-hungry housewives read to while away those lonely hours out in suburbia, out in Levittown. He had gone missing for a week or more and his wife, Eileen was desperately trying to find him and bring him back to their oceanfront Malibu home. Here is where Terry, or rather Marlowe’s stand-up shut- up guy defense of Terry, got him the job since Mrs. Waits had read about Marlowe in the newspapers and decided he was the man to find her errant husband. Marlowe finally seeing some dough, easy dough, on the horizon and the back of his landlords’ heads took the case and in a short time was able to find old Roger holed up trying to dry out (again) in a sanatorium. Marlowe brought him home to his ever-loving wife and that was that. End of story.

No, again no, Roger had taken a liking to Marlowe, wanted to hire him to protect him against his demons, real and imagined, but Marlowe said no deal. He was not a baby-sitter, or manservant, which is what was required. What might have changed his mind , if anything, though was this Eileen Waits, Roger’s trophy wife, whose slim figure, faraway blue eyes, wistful expression, and slight whiff of perfume, gardenia something, had him thinking about silky sheets and sultry bedroom afternoons. But that was not to be, although not for his lack of trying, giving very definite signals. What happened to forestall that possibility was not that not long after he had gotten Roger home, dried out for a while, he started drinking again, and started to be haunted by his demons. One day Roger in some drunken rage, or drunken stupor, shot himself, committed suicide. Marlowe wasn’t buying that one either since Waits, whatever his writer’s block, whatever feelings he had that he was washed up, a has been, was not a suicide guy. Marlowe now had to dig into this one if for no other reason than surrounded by two suicides in short order he had to get out from under the tag of a guy to not be around if you cared about your health, or your life.

Things were a mess until Marlowe stepped back and put a couple things together. First off the Waits knew the Wyatts, travelled in some of the same circles out in Malibu, having been to some of the same charity events and the like. That came out by accident when the cops were investigating Roger’s suicide. Without too much trouble he also found out that Laura Wyatt had numbered Roger Waits as one of her trophies. And that set up everything else once Roger’s houseboy gave Marlowe enough information about Mrs. Waits and her strange nocturnal habits, her vague longing for some soldier boy first love long gone that she had married before Roger habits. Not so long gone though since that soldier boy was one Terry Lennox (although they had been married with him using a different name in London during the war).

Eileen Waits enraged that the tramp Laura had taken her first man, long thought to be dead in after some secret raid in Norway, that he had become nothing but a degenerate kept pet by Laura and had also taken her second man and flouted that fact making no attempt to conceal the affair or their guest house love-making murdered both of them. Although no jury would had convicted her even if the D.A. decided to try the case. A beautiful, disturbed (and wealthy) widow was not the kind of murder case that would sail in celebrity-conscious Los Angeles. And that case would not be tried because Laura’s father, that couple of Vegas-connected hoods, and the on-the-take cops had closed the case previously, closed it up tight. And that is the end of the story.

Well not quite. Something still did not add up, especially the role of those two hoods, war buddies or not, going way out of their way to shut the case down, to warn Marlowe off. So he again stepped back and what he figured out was that no way, no way on this good green earth did Terry Lennox die in Mexico. The whole thing was fixed, fixed by Terry and the boys. And the way Marlowe found that out was simple, simplicity itself, Lennox, disguised as a Mexican, showed up at his door one day and flaunted that hard fact in Marlowe’s face. Then he walked away. And Marlowe for his own reasons, for an old friendship gone awry, let him. Yeah, that Terry Lennox was a piece of work. End of story.

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II- From Deep In The Songbook-Elegant Duke Ellington’s Take The ‘A’ Train …

… it had been quite  a day as she viewed, viewed in awe since she was of an age, eighteen, when the wonders of the world could awe her, awe her small world North Adamsville existence, as the million twilight lights, maybe billion lights, of New York City came into view from the railing of ship she was standing on. It had been a struggle, a titanic struggle, to get her mother, her sainted small existence Irish Catholic mother, to let her take her first trip away from home alone. First trip of any sort except that time they drove up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire back in 1939 but at eighteen and adventurous that did not count. And she was not really alone on this trip either since one of the conditions for going was that she go with a girlfriend. In this case, Lottie, or as her mother called her, that Riley girl, who was standing awestruck right beside her just then.

And so here they were coming into port after spending most of the day getting there from Rose Wharf in Boston having gone through majestic Cape Cod Canal on the way, awestruck then too. As they prepared to dock she, or Lottie either, could not believe that so many skyscrapers, topped off by the Empire State Building, could exist in so small area. The Boston skyline looked like some boondock outpost in comparison. They would investigate all of that after they settled into the Hotel Bellevue and freshened for the beginning of their three day stay. They, naturally, fully expected to see all the sights, the Automat, Times Square, Broadway, the Statue of Liberty, go up that Empire State Building in person, and do all that any tourist was supposed to do. But what drove them to this city, what made her cross swords with her mother, pressure Lottie into coming along, and face the prospect of seasickness was to be able to go to one of the clubs, one of the billion clubs like Minton’s ,the Kit-Kat , or the Hi-Top and hear real guys, Benny, Duke, Chick, Tommy, Jimmy, Frank, Jesus, maybe Frank,  whoever was in town play or sing to swing, blessed sainted swing and nothing else, for keeps. And she, they, were not disappointed…                   

 

*******

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times,  or whether we cared, music was as dear a thing to them as to us, their sons and daughters, who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. As well, whether we knew it or not, knew what sacred place the music of the late 1930s and 1940s, swing, be-bop swing, be-bop flat-out, show tunes, you know jitter-bug stuff, and the like held in their youthful hearts that was the music, their getting through the tough times music, that went wafting through the house on the radio, on record player, or for some the television, of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68. And some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to what our forebears were attuned to when they came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which they too had not created, and had no say in creating.

Yes they were crazy for the swing and sway of bespectacled Benny Goodman blowing that clarinet like some angel- herald letting the world know,  if it did know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not swing, with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, better with, better with, swaying slightly lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Why Don’t You Do Right vowing he would do just that for a smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Harry James with or without the orchestra , better with, blowing Gabriel’s horn, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his You Made Me Love You to the top of the charts. Elegant Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas, on Taking The ‘A’ Train. Tommy Dorsey all banded up if there is such a word making eyes misty with I’ll Never Smile Again.  Jimmy Dorsey too with his own aggregation wailing Tangerine that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller, with or without those damn glasses, taking that Sentimental Journey before his too soon last journey. Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday, Lady Day, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had, that meaningful pause, yeah, Lady Sings The Blues. Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man, Jesus.  Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting going for that Old Black Magic. Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts. Mr. Billy Eckstine, too. Mr. Frank Sinatra doing a million songs fronting for the Dorseys and anybody who wanted to rise in that swinging world, with or without a horde of bobbysoxers breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame (and later too). The Inkspots, always with that spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, doing teary I’ll Get By or If I Didn’tCare. The Mills Brothers with or without those paper dolls. The Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops with or without whatever they were doing with or without. Mr. Cole Porter, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of  Tin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes. Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, ditto Mr. Porter. And Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother, creating Summertime and a thousand other catchy tunes. Yeah, their survival music.  

We the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,”  decidedly not your parents’  or grandparents’ (please, please do not say great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation could not bear to hear that music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that they were trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.  

We were moreover, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through that decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the their newer world, their struggles to  satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their youth  they dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from, survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…

Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies, three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest, the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in. Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on its last legs.  Hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.

Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink. Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.

Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts.  And that day not him, not him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos)  were dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb  that gnawing  hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all. 

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the land of “milk and honey.”  Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell, any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and  take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.      

Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs,   Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.  

The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big, well big band, replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren , no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare (nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door  hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to do a thing about it.  Banished, all such things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.       

 

Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II.  A time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before, had taken their number when they were called.  And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell in line.

Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny.  Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.  

Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else. Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines, many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god forsaken piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board, hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers were not afraid, or should have been) but who gave a good accounting of themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires, keeping the womenfolk happy.

All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every war,  who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, Always, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, Sentimental Journey, songs that spoke of true love, their true love that would out last the ages, would carrying them through that life together if they could ever keep those damn night-takers at bay, songs about faraway places, We’ll Meet Again, Til Then, songs that spoke of future sorrows, future partings, future returnings (always implying though that maybe there would be no return), future sacrifices, future morale-builders, songs about keeping lamp- lights burning, songs to give meeting to that personal sacrifice, to keep the womenfolk, to keep her from fretting her life away waiting for that dreaded other drop, songs about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them.

Songs to make the best out of the situation about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, that small white house with the white picket fence (maybe needing a little painting, maybe they could do that together), kids, maybe a new car once in a while you know the stuff that keeps average joes alive in sullen foxholes, sea-sick troop transports, freezing cargo planes, keeps them good and alive. Hell, songs, White Cliffs Of Dover songs, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened, drawing closer, getting all, uh, moony-eyed, and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, wet behind the ears, with that white paper service cap at some obscure angle and now smudged white jacket implying that he was in the service too, told them to leave he was closing up they held out for one last tune. Then, well-fortified with swoony feelings they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, if near a pond, the back forty, if near the back forty, the hills, you know, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, do I have draw you a map, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.              

The music, this survival music, Harry James, Benny, the Dorsey boys, Bing, Frank, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, and on and on wafted (nice word, huh) through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized possession centered in the small square living room of my growing up house amid the squalor of falling roof tiles, a broken window or two patched up with cardboard and tape, a front door that would not shut, rooms with second-hand sofas, mattresses, chairs, desks, tables, mildewy towels, corroded sinks, barely serviceable bathtubs, and  woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs. My broken down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held with masking tape in need of panes, no proof needed, overgrown lawn in need of cutting of a shack (there is literally no other way to describe it, then or in its current condition) of a too small, much too small for four growing boys and two parents, house. The no room to breathe, no space but shared space, the from hunger look of all the denizens, the stink of my father’s war wounds that would not heal, the stink of too many people in too small a house, excuse me shack. The noise, damn the noise from the nearby railroad, putting paid to wrong side of the tracks-dom worst of all. Jesus.      

That wrong side of the tracks shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack houses, too small to fit big Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams. Small dreams of Johnny or Jimmy getting on the force (cops, okay), and Lorrie and Pamela getting those secure City Hall jobs in the steno pool until some bright prospect came by and threw a ring at them but in the meantime shack life, and small faded dreams. Funny, no, ironic but these tumbled-down shacks which seemingly would fall with a first serious wind represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such unnamed weirdness then I just cried out in some fit of angst, cried out against that railroad noise, and that sour smell of sweat) the great good desire of those warriors, and almost to a man they had served, and their war brides who had waited, had fretted while waiting, to latch onto a piece of golden age America.

And take their struggle survival music from Doc’s jukebox, from the Starlight Ballroom, from WDJA, with them as if to validate their sweet memory dreams, their youthful innocence before the guys got caught up, caught up close and personal, the ugliness of war, the things they would not speak of unto the grave, and the gals not asking, not asking for all the money in the world but sensing that he, they, had changed, had lost some youthful thing. That radio, that priceless radio console taking pride of place, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard radio station manager knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the basics for the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and brides.

My harried mother, harried like all the neighborhood large brood mothers, harried by the bleak wanting prospects of the day with four growing boys and not enough, nor enough food, not enough, well, just not enough and leave it at that. Maybe bewildered is a better expression for her plight, for her wartime young marriage adventure not wanting to be left with only a memory of my father if things went wrong in the Pacific. As so she took to turning the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine would chase her immediate sorrows away. Yea, a quick boost of their songs was called for, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs before he shipped out. Those songs   embedded deep in memory, wistful young memory, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her appointed household rounds. And whether she won or lost the day’s bout with not enough, with some ill-winded message from some bill due, seemingly always some four boy hurt, some bad father work news, the list of her daily sorrows and trepidations could have stretched to infinity she perked up, swayed even to those tunes.

That stuff, that mother dream stuff, that piano/drum-driven stuff with some torch-singer, Peggy Lee, Helen Morgan, Margaret Whiting, maybe even a sneak Billie thrown in bleeding all over the floor drove me crazy then  Some she bleeding with the pain of  her thwarted loves, her man hurts, her wanderings in search of something in this funny old world, her waitings, waiting for the good times, waiting in line for the rations, waiting, waiting alone mind you, for her man to come home, come home whole from some place whose name she could not pronounce, they should have called it the waiting generation, just flat-out drove me crazy then. Mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach (not the old torn down Doc’s of their generation over on Billings Road if that is what you are thinking). As far as I know Doc (the son of their Doc), knowing his demographics as well as that radio executive at WDJA, did not, I repeat, did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.