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
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth
Some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school (The Farmer in the Dell, etc. in case you forgot) and embedded in the back of your mind even fifty years later. Some reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in my case was the music that got my parents through my father’s slogging and mother anxiously waiting World War II. You know, Frank, The Andrew Sisters, Peggy Lee, etc. Other music, the music of my generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what I wanted to hear when I had my transistor radio to my ear up in my bedroom. Yeah, Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Jerry Lee, etc. again. The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste.
Acquired through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s when they would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music to play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, I don’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.
The real stuff having been around for while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll. So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden electric blues some time to filter through my brain. What did not take a long time once I got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when I saw him perform. Once I saw him practically eat that harmonica he was playing on How Many More Years . Yes, that is an acquired taste and a lasting one.
Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music OF The Carter Family (First Generation)
You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes. As a kid I could not abide it but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high and school after when I hung around Harvard Square I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.
Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early day. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.
The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player. But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues
The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left
When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics.(1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the American bourgeois political upheavals that led to Chicago hell in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits that a student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought.)
Those scorned old leftists, mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who survived the 1950s red scare or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare and the Stalinists had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face- rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists. Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site. So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants. *************** A Frank Jackman comment (2014):
Recently I wrote a short piece in a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back, the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.
I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still holds true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days, now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s, made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense. A Markin disclaimer:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 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 various blogs and other networking media. 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. So read on.
HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin
Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.
A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary
The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972
The now slightly receding figure of the 20th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.
Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.
To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.
I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.
The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21st century. Read on.
Out In The James Dean Night-With Robert Altman’s Come Back To The
Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
DVD Review From The Pen Of Frank Jackman Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, starring
Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, directed by Robert Altman, 1982 Jeff Sterling, the now retired journalist whose by-line appeared
in many of the coffee-table magazines put there by those of the generation of
‘68 who still felt an unread urge to at least display tokens of their youth,
was devoted to all things James Dean, an interest he would carry from his youth
and throughout his working life. Had seen in Dean’s larger-than- life figure
more than the other icons of the era like the young brash Brando with his
brooding sexuality, his “better move on brother if you don’t want all hell
coming down on your head,” his Johnny swagger around the women with a “take ‘em
or leave ‘em” pose which for young Jeff defied all the anguish and trauma of
his own girl-driven youth a kindred spirit. Or Elvis as much as he was driven,
girl-driven to palely imitate the “King” with his sullen baby boy pose (that sullenness
more than one girl, more than one tween girl of Jeff’s acquaintance was willing
to turn into a smile), those sideburns and that hair combed just so, and those
endlessly moving, gyrating, swiveling or whatever he could do with them hips
that spoke of satin sheets and sweaty nights. Both, whatever else they projected,
exuded an aura of long and fruitful lives about them whereas Dean, even a quick
flash look at him exuded a certain casted dark shadow, a certain fatalistic
view of the world turning him over soon much like his own then. Assuredly Jeff was not attracted to Dean like some fan club
groupie with a room filled with commercial memorabilia, his family had little
extra money to do much more than provide an occasional outing at the Saturday
matinee up at the old Strand Theater over by the Fields Corner Redline subway
stop in the Dorchester section of Boston where he had grown to manhood in one
of those infamous crowded triple-deckers that covered the area like a spider’s
web. Nor was he like some blurry-eyed budding girl like one of his sister’s
friends who did have Photoplay movie
magazine cut-out photos of Dean all over her bedroom walls because she thought
his blue-eyes, his blond hair, hell, even his world wary smirk which she had
confessed to that sister she would not mind trying to change in person were
“boss.” And Jeff decidedly was not one of those who twenty, thirty, forty years
later still commemorated Dean’s 1955 death date like doing so would bring back
the crushed crash dead, bring back some lost garden, bring back that long faded
youth which would be eternally Dean’s. Jeff, as he told his old Dorchester streets friend, Tim Riley, a
few weeks before at the Sunny Grille over a few cups of wine, had simple identified
with the brooding smoldering figure of Dean not from the obvious film choice,
1955s Rebel Without A Cause, a
preview of the jail-break from square cubed parents, ditto authority and
cookie-cutters that his generation would take full throttle over the next
decade or so, but the more literary East
of Eden (adapted from a John Steinbeck novel of the same name) where Dean
suffered all the angst, alienation, confusion, sexual stirrings and questioning
the hypocrisy of the world that he had no say in creating that Jeff himself had
endured. (When somebody had asked him how he only ten or so when that film came
out was able to see Eden when she was
watching Snow White or some Disney
film he told her it was simply family economics since his parents could not
afford a baby-sitter so they could go alone they dragged all the kids along,
kids who got in free by the way accompanied by a parent in those days.) Jeff drew a distinction between the obviously alienated Rebel Dean caught up in some greater
West Coast social drama dealing with JDs, hot-rod culture, and guys with time
and discretionary money on their hands and the more subtle truths in Eden. So Jeff saw in the almost biblical
Cain and Abel saga of Eden a
replication of his own growing up times, of trying to make sense of a world he
didn’t create, and didn’t feel like he fit into. Saw too, maybe post hoc sincewhat would a barely teen-aged boy know of such things, James Dean along with Marlon Brando,
Elvis and a few others as important coming of age icons for his generation’s
jailbreak leap in the 1960s. That said, Jeff was at pains to insist whenever he
was called on the subject by one of his old-time corner boys, including the
night he was discussing the subject with Tim Riley, that he did love the
midnight “chicken run” scene in Rebel,
having himself ridden shot-gun for Dwayne Hutton on a few midnight runs when
some redneck guys from Dedham or Norwood wanted to challenge Dwayne’s reign as
king of the hill on the flats around the old Naval Air Station near the bay. Although Jeff has never been a fanatic about his tastes he
nevertheless will take any appropriate occasion to wax poetic about the first
of a line of creative guys, white guys mainly, who lived by the motto-“live
fast, die young, and make a good corpse.” As he told Tim when they were at the
Sunny Grille thanks to modern technology he has been able to watch such classic
(and only major) Dean films as Rebel
Without A Cause, Giant, and East Of
Eden in the comfort of his own home. And has been able to watch other
related documents to the Dean legend like Robert Altman’s Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. He had
recently re-watched the film and one night he was talking with another of his
old high school friends, Sam Lowell, over a few glasses of white wine at
Simmy’s Grille over in Gloversville about the highlights of the film and reminiscences
of a review that he did when that film came out in the 1980s for the now long
defunct East Bay Other in California:
“Who knows who, where or when some new trend, some new icon will
hit the population right between the eyes, will speak to some unnamed, maybe
un-nameable, feeling that makes a person whole for a few minutes. You can name
the icons in a couple of minutes though the ones that strike your own generation
most easily come to mind and that for my generation would include the unseen
subject of Come Back To The Five And Dime
Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,James Dean.
Not everybody, including this reviewer, did like the women from that small
Texas town did and form a club, create a shrine to, or commemorate the
personage of James Dean but many drew some kind of sustenance from his life,
his story, and that mumbling confusion about what was happening to him in a
world that he did not create, and which he had no say in creating that he
projected on the screen. That look stirred many more people than those
aficionados like the women in this film. This is an intriguing film in many ways from the single set
setting of the inside of a Woolworths’ Five and Dime store to the dramatic
secrets that these women have held within themselves since they formed the
James Dean Fan Club in 1955 and had enshrined his memory psychically and
psychological since his death that year. There was probably no more iconic site
in small town America in the 1950s beside some steepled church or the post
office on Main Street than the local branch of the national Woolworth’s chain.
That home for every cheap gimcrack known to humankind was central to the
growing up experience of lots of small town baby-boomers and their older
brothers and sisters who bought their first small gifts for some sweetheart
there, or had something to eat at the lunch counter (make mine a grilled cheese
sandwich and lime rickey in season, please at the one I frequented in Uphams
Corner), or, and here is where we separate out the generations, find out who
was touched by the Dean glow, played the jukebox three songs for a quarter that
was conveniently located within arm’s reach at that counter. Later events, the
sit-ins of early 1960s down south to integrate those damn counters (and support
efforts by those in the North who picketed in front of the store in Boston
including this reviewer) would seriously tarnish the image of that idyllic
scene as would the triumph of the mall in finishing such stores off in small
town downtown. Strangely this film although it is about devotees of the James
Dean mystique is very little about him and plenty about what drove the various
personalities to join the cluband to
keep the flame alive twenty years later. And the almost mythical hold that his
person held in their lives, for good or evil. Apparently James Dean cast spell
on the ability of the women to tell the truth, if only to themselves. Starting
with the leader of the club, Mona (played with great aplomb and feeling by
Sandy Dennis) who was so hooked on the Dean legend that she created a separate universe
for herself claiming that the illegitimate child, Jimmy Dean, that she
conceived was Dean’s child, moving on to Sissy (played by Cher with that
world-weary and wariness that she has brought to many roles) who has lied to
herself that her husband was coming back after he had rejected her after her
breast cancer operation, and, finally, to the other central figure, Joanne
(played by Karen Black with that slippery sexuality she brought to many roles)
who as it turned out had been, back in the day, a guy, Joe, who it turned out
had been transgender and had hadan
operation to prove it. Oh yeah, and who back in the day had impregnated Mona
and thus the other unseen Jimmy Dean of the title. Nice work, Robert Altman. Of course some films are meant to further some storyline, others
like this one are conceived to highlight the interplay between characters and
in this film that is exactly what you get. Get the interplay between the
characters (including the lesser characters which fill out the cast, tough and
cynical Stella Mae, fertile Edna Mae, and the older woman, Juanita who managed
the store) through flashbacks to events in 1955 interspersed with the 1975
actions all confined to that single store. Moreover the interplay between the characters
at any given moment made you think the whole experiment could blow up any
minute as the deep secrets keep slowly getting revealed to show, well, to show
that these women were made of ordinary human clay, just wanted something to
believe in, something greater than themselves and their ordinary human clay
lives. Join the club, sisters, join the club.
Johnny Prescott’s Itch- With Kudos To
Mister Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula
GENE VINCENT
Well, be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love
Well, she's the girl in the red blue
jeans
She's the queen of all the teens
She's the one that I know
She's the one that loves me so
Say be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love
Well, she's the one that gots that beat
She's the one with the flyin' feet
She's the one that walks around the store
She's the one that gets more more more
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love
He had the itch. John Prescott had the
itch and he had it bad, especially since his eyes flamed up consumed with
hell-bend flames when he saw Elvis performing live on the Ed Sullivan Show
one Sunday night. And he had it so bad that he had missed, unbeknownst to his
parents who would have been crestfallen and, perhaps, enraged, his last few
piano lessons. Sure, he covered his butt by having saxophonist Sid Stein,
drummer Eddie Shore, and bass player Kenny Jackson from his improvisational
school jazz combo, The G-Clefs (yah, yah, I knowa well-thought out name for a musical group)
come by his house to pick him up. While standing at the Prescott door parents the
sidemen went through the “well aren’t things looking up for you boys,” and
“they seem to be” scene without missing a beat. But as soon as Kenny’s 1954
Nash Rambler turned the corner of Walnut Street Johnny was a long-gone daddy,
real long-gone. And where he was long-gone but not forlorn to was to Sally
Ann’s Music Shop over on the far end of West Main Street. Now the beauty of
Sally Ann’s was that it was, well, Sally Ann’s, a small shop that was well off
the main drag, and therefore not a likely place where any snooping eyes, ears
or voices that would report to said staid Prescott parents when Johnny went in
or out of the place. Everyone, moreover, knew Sally Ann’s was nothing but a
run-down past its prime place and if you really wanted all the best 45s, and
musical instrument stuff then every self-respecting teenager in town hit the
tracks for Benny’s Music Emporium right downtown and only about a quick
five-minute walk from North Clintondale High where Johnny and the combo served
their high school time, impatiently served their high school time.
But her greatest sin, although up until
a few weeks ago Johnny would have been agnostic on that sin part, was that she
was behind, way behind the curve, on the rock ‘n’ rock good night wave coming
though and splashing over everybody, including deep jazz man, Johnny Prescott.
But Sally Ann had, aside from that secluded locale and a
tell-no-tales-attitude, something Johnny could use. She had a primo Les Paul
Fender-bender guitar in stock just like the one Gene Vincent used that she was
willing to let clandestine Johnny play when he came by. And she had something
else Johnny could use, or maybe better Sally Ann could use. She had an A-Number
One ear for guys who knew how to make music, any kind of music and had the bead
on Johnny, no question. See Sally Ann was looking for one more glory flame, one
more Clintondale shine moment, and who knows maybe she believed she could work
some Colonel Parker magic and so Johnny Prescott was king of the Sally Ann day.
King, that is, until James and Martha
Prescott spotted the other G-Clefs (Kenny, Sid, Eddie) coming out of the Dean
Music School minus Johnny, minus a “don’t know where he is, sir,” Johnny. And
Mr. Dean, Johnny’s piano instructor, was clueless as well, believing Johnny’s
telephone story about having to work for the past few weeks and so lessons were
to be held in abeyance. Something was definitely wrong if Mr. Dean, the man who
more than anyone else recognized Johnny’s raw musical talent in about the third
grade had lost Johnny's confidence. But the Prescotts got wise in a hurry
because flutist Mary Jane Galvin, also coming out the school just then, and
overhearing the commotion about Johnny’s whereabouts decided to get even with
one John Prescott by, let’s call a thing by its right name, “snitching” on him
and disclosed that she had seen him earlier in the day when she walked into
Sally Ann’s looking for an old Benny Goodman record that featured Peggy Lee and
which Benny’s Emporium, crazed rock ‘n’ rock hub Benny’s would not dream of
carrying, or even have space for.
The details of the actual physical
confrontation with Johnny by his parents (with Mr. Dean in tow) are not very
relevant to our little story. What is necessary to detail is the shock and
chagrin that James and Martha exhibited on hearing of Johnny’s itch, his itch
to be the be-bop, long-gone daddy of the rock ‘n’ roll night. Christ, Mr. Dean
almost had a heart attack on the spot when he heard that Johnny had, and we
will quote here, “lowered himself to play such nonsense,” and gone over to the
enemy of music. As mentioned earlier Mr. Dean, before he opened his music
school, had been the roving music teacher for the Clintondale elementary
schools and had spotted Johnny’s natural feel for music early on. He also knew,
knew somewhere is his sacred musical bones, that Johnny’s talents, his
care-free piano talents in particular, could not be harnessed to classical
programs, the Bachs, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff, so that he encouraged Johnny
to work his magic through be-bop jazz then in high fashion, and with a long
pedigree in American musical life. When he approached the Prescotts about
coordinating efforts to drive Johnny’s talents by lessons his big pitch had
been that his jazz ear would assure him of steady work when he came of age,
came of age in the mid-1950s.
This last point should not be
underestimated in winning the Prescotts over. James worked, when there was
work, as a welder, over at the shipyards in Adamsville, and Martha previously
solely a housewife, in order to pay for those lessons (and be a good and caring
mother to boot) had taken on a job filling jelly donuts (and other donut stuff)
at one of the first of the Dandy Donuts shops that were spreading over the
greater Clintondale area.
Christ, filling donuts. No wonder they
were chagrined, or worst.
Previously both parents were proud,
proud as peacocks, when Johnny really did show that promise that Mr. Dean saw
early on. Especially when Johnny would inevitably be called to lead any musical
assemblage at school, and later when, at Mr. Dean’s urging, he formed the G-Clef
and began to make small amounts of money at parties and other functions. Rock
‘n’ rock did not fit in, fit in at all in that Prescott world. Then damn Elvis
came into view and corrupted Johnny’s morals, or something like that. Shouldn’t
the authorities do something about it?
Johnny and his parents worked out a
truce, well kind of a truce, kind of a truce for a while. And that kind of a
truce for a while is where old Sally Ann entered in again. See, Johnny had so
much raw rock talent that she persuaded him to have his boys (yes, Kenny, Sid
and Eddy in case you forgot) come by and accompany him on some rock stuff. And
because Johnny was loved by Aunt Sally (not Sally Ann, just old Aunt Sally by
then) was loved, loved in the musical sense if not in the human affection sense
by the other boys they followed along. Truth to tell they were getting the itch
too, a little.
And that little itch turned into a very
big itch indeed when at that very same dime-dropper, Mary Jane Galvin’s sweet
sixteen party concert (yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl to have such a party
that was going out of fashion among the hip younger girls who had dreams of
seashore conquests and no time for dopey parties), the G-Clefs finished one of
their covers, Dizzy’s Salt Peanuts with some rock riffs. The kids
started to get up, started dancing in front of their seats to the shock of the
parents and Mary Jane (yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl), including the senior
Prescotts, were crazy for the music. And Johnny’s fellow G-Clefs noticed,
noticed very quickly that all kinds of foxy frails (girls, okay), girls who had
previously spent much time ignoring their existences, came up all dreamy-eyed
and asked them, well, asked them stuff, boy-girl stuff.
Oh, the Sally Ann part, the real Sally
Ann part not just the idea of putting the rock band together. Well, she talked
her talk to the headmaster over at North Clintondale High (an old classmate,
Clintondale Class of 1925, and flame from what the boys later heard) and got
the boys a paying gig at the upcoming school Spring Frolics. And the money was
more than the G-Clefs, the avant guarde
G-Clefs made in a month of jazz club appearances, to speak nothing of girls
attached. So now the senior Prescotts are happy, well as happy as parents can
be over rock ‘n’ roll. And from what I hear Johnny and the Rocking Ramrods are
going, courtesy of Aunt Sally, naturally, to be playing at the Gloversville
Fair this coming summer. Be-bop-a-lula indeed.
Victorian Secrets-Hugh Dancy And Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Hysteria
No question medical science like all great progressive movements
got moving along through fits and starts. It was not all that long ago (in human
history terms) that soap, simple soap, could help keep up hygiene and sickness
away, including keeping hands clean on the operating table. Nor was it all that
long ago that bleeding the body with leeches was the cure-all for many ailments.
So medicine has truly moved in a jagged path. Take for instance the subject of
the film under review, Hysteria, what
in Victorian times was labelled female hysteria, you know when no one used the
s-x word to discuss anything, when women, women of means anyway went to doctors,
reputable doctors to have what ailed them fixed. And what ailed them was sexual
frustration brought on by everything from dissatisfaction in bed with her
bedmate to problems with menopause.
Now that medical treatment required time, energy and money and so
like lots of things in this wicked old world an invention, the vibrator, got discovered
almost by accident to, ah, privatize the treatment. Make treatment more widely available
and cheaper. The film’s story-line goes along showing how the discovery was
made by Doctor Granville (played by Hugh Dancy) after he had been so “overworked’
using the old massage, proper massage with cover method of inducing orgasms on
the medical table, and how the vibrator became the new next best thing and made
the inventors and manufacturers rich. And assuredly many women happy.
Of course a straight forward account of that invention would be, well,
pretty boring on its face if it was just a matter of developing a new therapy rather
than some porno worthy “sex toy.” The “real” story line, the “boy meets girl” story
line that drives a lot of films like this is the coy budding romance between the good doctor
and his doctor- employer’s older daughter, Charlotte (played by fetching Maggie
Gyllenhaal), a modern day feminist who drives him crazy but who in the end
proves that he is worthy of her, is worthy of being her husband and letting the
better angel of his nature emerge. Of course that “boy meets girl” invention
has been going on for a long time and the status of the medical profession at
any given time has been unable to provide a treatment to ease matters of the
heart. Enough said.
video/photos/song:Boston Martin Luther King Day speakout 1/17/2015
The weekly sat. peace vigil at Park St. in Boston held its annual Martin Luther King Day weekend vigil and speakout.
Boston Common-Jan. 17, 2015: The weekly sat. peace vigil at Park St. in Boston held its annual Martin Luther King Day weekend vigil and speakout. We played several recordings of MLK's speeches from the 1950s-1960s over our sound system,which attracted a good sized crowd despite the 20 degree cold. Vigil members then spoke on how MLK would view the war, racism, and poverty he spoke about and protested,in context of 2015-- the US wars around the world, the racism of police violence against people of color, the wars abroad draining dollars needed to fight poverty at home. Here are links to photos and video I took: Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157649933561070/