Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell 

 

Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. With the wizardry of modern technology Frank had had the review placed in a blog dedicated to all things retro 1950s and 1960s (two slightly different retros but guys like Frank and Jack squeeze both eras.) Prior to Jack’s viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days. About the days when chance had caused him to meet Frank at Myles Standish after his family had moved from Clintonville a few miles away in the summer before fifth grade and the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade created their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails and gain their own fame (although their standard had not been fifteen minutes but infinity, or when the girls started gathering around, whichever came first).    

What got Jack thinking along those lines was something Frank’s long-time companion, Laura, whom he had seen the film with, had told Frank. She said to him that she had had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film’s story line, the part about the furious growing up “from hunger” strivings of the guys who would become the Four Seasons out in the 1950s New Jersey night, had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period of late. The kind of things that Frank wrote about after Jack and he discussed various incidents in growing up absurd in the 1950s at their “watering hole” sessions which they initiated after they had then recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that part, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed Frank, for better or worse, no question. And that feeling got through to Jack as well.

Frank’s had told Jack when he asked why he was writing some many sketches about the past, also placed in retro blogs dedicated to such reflections, that his purpose in writing about the old days had not been to put paid to some ghosts of the past as a lot of guys they knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going back to Carver to re-flame old sport’s dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of their other pals, Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone to his (their) fiftieth class reunion at Carver High and came away more depressed than anything since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already. Moreover Frank said he certainly had not intended to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate, how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela wheel any particular way but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other of his later acquaintances Josh and Phil Larkin who were also from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean. 

Of course lately Jack had begun, feeding off Frank’s tidbits as well as that film, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Strangely both Frank and Jack agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s big interest in this film had been the almost chemically pure corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not at all unlike his (and Frank’s) Carver corner boy growing up saga.        

In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options mentioned early in the film once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson, who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles, the reformatory, or become famous. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.

It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (doo wop girls’ groups too who were cruising to the top the charts but the Carver guys really weren’t interested in them because there was no way they could get anything to help them break-out from paying attention to girl groups, yeah, foolish guys) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew were hitting it big from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. Dick Clark and that Bandstand was in elementary school anyway, in elementary school at the time when they were getting hipped to music was mandatory to see who was who in the teenage song firmament, see what guys were wearing, see what dances guys were expected to know how to do, sweaty palms and two left feet not withstanding, and, and what chicks looked cool on the show. That last maybe the biggest draw of all as everybody rushed home after school to catch the show.     

Funny the black group thing was not a big deal, or Jack and the others didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television. Jack would never really since a live black person until years later when he ran track and would run against black guys in the big meets up in Boston Garden. Other than grabbing tips, like having the lead singer off to the side, everybody having the same outfit, the harmony guys snapping their fingers to the beat, and staying on beat with the lead singer they had no racial options about the music and they,  meaning mainly Jack at first, figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers so they would be working a different street. (Jack and Frank, later in high school, when the civil rights movement was on the television every night practically would get a very rude awaking both within their families and among their fellow students and neighbors when they expressed the slightest sympathy for the black liberation struggle but back in sixth grade there was nothing to it)  That niche was not all thought out in such a refined manner as Jack was now recalling in retrospect but what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.   

That summer before sixth grade right after school got out for the summer was when the Myles Standish corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame, got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there had not been any stores to stand in front of holding up the wall in the “projects” where they lived like in the pictures they had seen on music magazines they looked through up in the main library up in Carver Square their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School. On hot summer nights the back was all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field from the gym entrance where they hung out. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly street corner guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead about the white boy doo-wop niche figured they could cash in on.

For a couple of weeks they practiced like crazy each night, no paying much attention to much else except exchanging fantasies about what kind of suits they would by, how to act when the crush of the crowds came on, what to do with swooning girls, kids’ stuff dream stuff. But mainly the practiced, trying like hell to work a smooth harmonious sound on the material they covered, covered by Frank copying down the lyrics each time a song they wanted to cover came on WMEX the local rock station (fortunately the big hits got played endlessly each cycle so Frank mainly got the words but on few he missed a couple and so they just incorporated what was there) with Red in the lead. Red really did have the best voice, really could project his voice, and Jack thinking back thought Red with some work and breaks could have made a nice career maybe as a lounge act out of his talent.      

That doo wop practice worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this doo wop jail break out had to do with sexual stirrings, with this cohort of corner boys finally noticing that those shapeless girls from fifth grade class like Cindy, Linda, Bessie, Rosalind (Jack’s favorite), some of them, were starting to get shapes and who the year before had been noting but nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night Red and the Roosters (nice name, right) crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche.

At first they were left all by themselves, maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as they left the courts, but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away up against a fence not hiding or anything but just kind of listening and swaying back and forth to the songs. (Jack thought the song they were working on was Little Antony and the Imperials Tears On My Pillows, although he would not swear to that. In any case that was the song that got him a dance with Rosalind so maybe he was confusing the two situations.)

A few nights later there would be several girls, including sixth grade girls and one from the other fifth grade class, Lorna who they called Lorna Doone for no particular reason but who was hot, standing at that fence. Jack thought that night if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ tear-jerker Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. Sang it several times. The girls came running on the excuse that they thought it was somebody’s birthday, somebody who needed consoling. Yeah, it was like that in the innocence boy-girl thing then, probably still is. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood just like since Adam and Eve time, maybe before. Jack never got to Rosalind then only later after school started and then she moved to another town and that ended his first serious love affair. Frank even with his two left feet got a date for the movies with Bessie, and Jack thought Red (with that mass of red hair), the best looking guy of the bunch from what the girls said but maybe that was just because they wanted get near the lead singer, as always, had gone “steady” with Lorna for a while until Red kind of went off by himself.           

See here is where things broke down. Sure Red and the Roosters could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what had happened. Their problem was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons from the get-go, they really did not have any serious raw musical talent (except Red) and did not as Frankie and his guys did really have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed about mid-way through sixth and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s did too but that was after the group broke up). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up in the summer before junior high. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out from the ‘from hungers,” on musical fame.

Red would a little later after they moved on to junior high turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime, which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close. Both of them had been “look-outs” when Red began his “clip” five-fingers discount rampage of the various stores up in Carver Center and Jack had worked with Red one night when they jack-rolled a drunk for fifty bucks. Frank and Jack soon moved away from that business though once they realized it was too much work and they felt too much anguish over what they were doing to make a career out of that life.     

Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd with some older tougher boys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner based on midnight creeps and some of those corner boys later wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Billy later who did a nickel’s worth for an armed robbery after he failed to make a half-hearted one more chance career singing alone and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a two-bit White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina after a second nickel stretch for another armed robbery).       

Jack as he thought about Red as he had not done so in a long time, thought about those last parts of the Carver corner boy story, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons thought the difference was important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as Jack noted in that review he had written and as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth seeing once again. And telling the Carver corner boys story too.   

[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts the when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,  Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]

Our Lady Of The Hills And Hollows-Jean Ritchie Passes At 92

 

 

 

 

 

Below is a segment from an entry I wrote for the American Folk Music blog discussing the roots of a city boy, me, and my relationship with the hills and hollows of Appalachia with which the late folksinger Jean Ritchie was so closely associated in her music:  

“What has gotten me into this reflective state is thinking about my father's background of coming from the hard-scrabble hills of Kentucky. That, my friends, means coal country, or it did in his time. The names Hazard, near Harlan County (the next county over to be exact) but, more appropriately "bloody Harlan" have, I hope, echoed across this series as a symbol for the hard life of many generations of workers and hard-scrabble tenant farmers who came out of those hills-some place. Some place in Appalachia, that is.

I have mentioned my father and his trials and tribulations, previously, when I did a series on the evolution of my youthful political trajectory from liberalism to socialism.  His hard-bitten, no breaks, no luck life was not a direct influence on that evolution, that is for sure. He was a strong anti-communist, if only of the reflexive kind coming out of that so-called “greatest generation” who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and then, rifle over one shoulder, fought in the hellish Pacific as a Marine in all their battles there in World War II. But something in the genes and in his character left an imprint. Let me sum up his life's experience this way- the tidbit that he imparted to me early on in life I will always remember and is probably why I am still struggling for our socialist future to this day.

My father was certainly no stranger to hard times as a youth thrown into the coal mines early (or, as it turned out, in his work travails as an adult). My father, perhaps like yours, was a child of the Great Depression of the 1930's, scratching and clawing his way from pillar to post and entered into his manhood as a Marine in combat in World War II. Hard combat in the Pacific, and as anyone who has studied the period will know, where no quarter was given, or taken. Those two facts are important. Why? As a very young kid I asked him why he became a soldier, excuse me, a Marine. Well, the short answer was this- between the two alternatives, starve or fight, he was glad, no more than glad he was ecstatic, to quickly sign up at the Marine recruiting station in order to get out of the hills of Kentucky. And he, moreover, whatever happened later, never looked back.

That, my friends, is why I entitled part of the headline to today's entry- "at one remove". Those hills are in my blood, no question, no question now as much as I might have resisted such feelings before, but also the notion that those terrible choices had to be made by an honest working-class stiff. And that is why today I am in this mood thinking about how desperately we need to get down that socialist road. Pronto. And why I hear Jean Ritchie’s voice singing of her own longings in The Hills of Home, my father’s hills, as I write this, down deep in my own being.”

 

Reflections On Boston’s Cancelled VFP-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Day 2015 -

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Frank Jackman would not be marching this year on Saint Patrick’s Day, not at all. And he was mad as hell about the matter, mad enough to call his old time high school friend from Carver, Sam Lowell, and spill his guts about it, to try to make some sense of the situation since toward the end, only a few days before he thought he would march, when things had happened quickly that forced him not to march. I knew Frank only slightly back in Carver during high school, enough to each give the other a passing nod, the “nod” signifying in that schoolboy goodnight that while the parties did not hang together everything between them was “cool” (remind me to tell you the intricacies of the “nod” sometime but today we are concern with Frank’s anguish not his coolness). I was closer to Sam back then since he had lived at the end of my street, we had hung around together during junior high before he got into the corner boy life in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner up on Main Street near the Commons and had kept in touch since he had set up his law practice was in the old town and I had worked on the Carver Democrat for a while after college before moving on to Boston and elsewhere. He is the one who gave me the “skinny” on what the recent events Frank had spoken to him about.

The pair had gotten back in touch with each other after Frank had moved back east after many years on the West Coast and after Sam’s older son Brad had been killed in Iraq on his second tour of duty in 2005 and he had taken an interest what Frank, an active member of an anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace (VFP), and his comrades were up to. Sam had attended some of their activities and had previously marched in their contingent at various parades. He had again planned to do so this year before Frank called with his story. For those who failed to scan the title of this piece what Frank Jackman was not marching in and what he was mad about at the same time was that the fifth annual Veterans For Peace (VFP)-led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston. He had, in accordance with the publicity surrounding the event put out by VFP, expected to step off at noon on Sunday March 15^th an hour before the official “private” Saint Patrick’s Parade sponsored by the Southie-centered Allied War Council (AWC) stepped off at one o’clock. A last minute decision by a federal judge though forced the peace parade to be cancelled by the VFP leadership.

(The time lag between the two events is important since by local court decree reflecting a decision on the type of parade AWC was sponsoring the two parades to be separated by one mile so as the AWC desired no one would think the two parades were in any way together. The reasons given for the peace parade cancellation for 2015, to be described in more detail below, centered on legal advice not to do so in support of a civic court action being pressed by VFP in federal court and that due to “the late in the day” timing of the results of the legal wrangling a proper parade could not be put together.)        

Frank, of course, had not been mad about not being able to march like he had been when he and Sam as kids were Boy Scouts from Troop Twelve in Carver and they were thrilled with the idea that they would go up to Boston some thirty miles away to strut their stuff. In those days back in the 1960s the parade, then sponsored in toto by the City would take place on March 17^th no matter the day. (under an Evacuation Day cover, you know, commemorating the day when the American revolutionaries kick butt on the occupying British forces something every Irish person could cheer as well as the “wink, wink” real purpose of the thing which is to celebrate Irish freedom from those same Brits and also to acknowledge some tale about the wicked old saint Pat kicking snakes out of the old sod when he got his dander up). The year Troop Twelve had been invited to march since it was their turn in the rotation of troops for Boy Scout Council Six wouldn’t you know that snow postponed the event for a week and due to some unforeseen circumstances that he never fully understood Troop Ten from Plymouth went instead. He had been furious since he had cousins that he would have been strutting his stuff in front of. The next year he having found himself a girlfriend or rather she found him he had dropped out of the Scouts and that was that.               

Frank had spent the many, many years since that time going about the business of his life, some good some bad, not worrying or thinking much one way or the other about the parade, although he was always ready to sport the green come Saint Patrick’s Day wherever he was and whoever he was with and to lift a glass to the memory of the boys of Easter 1916 reciting William Butler Yeats poem of the same name to allwho would listen. One of the “some bad” parts of his life had been his service in the military during his generation’s war, the war in Vietnam, which had torn the country asunder, including in the military where those “cannon fodder” like him who were supposed to fight for who knows  what reason were half in mutiny.     

Frank always liked to make sure that everybody, including Sam with whom he had many arguments about the question and who had been 4-F (unfit for military duty) during that war due to a much operated on left arm that was about ninety percent useless, knew that while he had had some reservations about military service he had gone in with both eyes open when he received his draft notice. He also made sure everybody knew that while he was not by any means the best soldier in Vietnam he was not the worse. A few guys in his unit had even paid him the compliment that they would have not gotten out of a few messes alive in fire-fights with Charley if it had not been for his coolness under fire. So during his time of service in order to keep himself together he did not think about right or wrong on the war, on the war policy or on anything but keeping low and keeping the damn bugs and sweat off. 

After Frank had been discharged in 1971 that was a different story. Even after a few days at home in Carver hanging around with Sam and the guys was too much after all he had been through and so he pushed on up to Cambridge where he wound up meeting a young Quaker woman whom he met at an anti-war rally who helped him sort things out, helped him get over the horror of what he had seen and done in Vietnam. A little. Just then lots of other veterans were also getting “religion” about the damn war and were doing something about it, organizing themselves into Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). For the next couple of years between that fetching Quaker woman and his ex-military ant-war comrades in VVAW he felt he had washed himself clean.

As the war petered out and as anti-war activity declined in the mid-1970s Frank drifted away from the organization and from that Quaker woman and headed west. Drifted west winding up in San Francisco, stayed in the west for many years, got married a few times, got divorced as many, had a few kids who all turned out pretty well considering, and did a lot of ad hoc anti-war and social concerns political work along the way. But Frank, as if those Vietnam days or maybe earlier his growing up poor childhood have never really receded to far from the horizon, also got caught up in some “wanting habits” (his term) addictions like drugs and con artistry along the way. I don’t know a lot of the details but some involved drug dealing connected with Mexico, some flim-flam insurance scams and a couple of swindles from what Sam who also was hazy on the same details told me Frank told him. After his last divorce in the mid-1990s he headed back East figuring a change of scenery would help.

In the fall, October Sam thinks, of 2002 Frank had been in Boston on some unrelated business on a Saturday afternoon when he heard a band playing I Ain’t Going To Study War No More, the music coming from the Boston Common. This, as it turned out, would be the first serious anti-war demonstration of a few hundred people before the war drums of the 2003 Iraq war overtook all reason (and despite all reason is still on the front-burner until this day). What drew Frank’s attention though was a cluster of about forty flags, white flags embossed with the words “Veterans For Peace” in black and a dove of peace also outlined in black on each, being carried by older guys, guys from the look of it who had served in Vietnam times, or earlier. As the march stepped off the Common to walk up Tremont Street toward the Federal Building further up the street he joined in their contingent. That was the real beginning of his story to Sam. 

Frank did not join VFP until several years later since the anti-war efforts against the Iraq war in late 2002 and early 3003 while intense before the war fell apart after the “shock and awe” campaign began in March of that year. He did however whenever he was around attend and march with the VFP. In November 2009 not having been doing much for a couple of years he received a notification by an e-mail that the VFP was attempting to march in the “official’ Veterans Day parade on the Common and he decided to join in. That day was an eye-opener, a shock in a way, since the “officials” were by might and main, mostly by having the police intercede and arrest anti-war veterans who refused to “stand-down” refused to let fellow veterans with a different message march in their precious parade. Frank and a number of others were arrested that day for disorderly conduct, were fined, and released. So maybe that, despite what Frank regarded as his start with VFP and their struggles for recognition in 2002, was really the beginning. VFP would continue without success to be part of the official Veterans Day Parade (a day by the way which they called, correctly, by its right name Armistice Day a name from the end of World War I).  

For the next year or so Frank worked closely with VFP on various projects (in the meantime he had retired and therefore had some time to spent on such work), especially in 2011 when VFP got seriously involved with the potentially exciting but short-lived Occupy movement. He had also spent a great deal of his time, still does, after he first heard about the case in September of 2010, in supporting the defense and calls for freedom for heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea (then Bradley, having subsequently revealed that she considered herself a woman a fact that the Army has now acknowledged) Manning who the Army was keeping in solitary down at the Quantico Marine Base outside of Washington, D.C.  (In August of 2013 Manning was convicted of about twenty of the charges against her and received an outrageous thirty-five sentence now being served at Fort Leavenworth pending the appeals process). The Manning case sparked something in him since here was a soldier, a soldier in Iraq to boot, who despite all the hell that was being rained down on her from top to bottom including torture had the courage to release important information about war atrocities and  other nefarious acts of the American government in the Middle East and elsewhere. Having not done his bit when he had the chance, his chance, Frank was just trying to put paid to his own lack of courage through Chelsea.  

In the spring of 2011 the leadership of the Boston VFP decided to apply to the AWC that had been running the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade for the previous twenty or so years. That request was summarily rejected and a member of that organization was quoted at some point in the process saying that he did not want the word “veteran” and the word “peace” put together in the parade. (This AWC having solely taken over the city parade had gone all the way up to the United States Supreme Court in order to have their parade declared a private event and therefore they could invite or not invite whoever they wanted. They had started out discriminating against the GLBTQ community and had now extended it to the peace community as well.) As a result of that exclusion the VFP put out a call for all the area peace, GLBTQ groups, and social justice activists to march with them after the official parade. And those five hundred or so who heeded the call marched through South Boston that day to generally good effect.  

VFP over the next three years continued to attempt to enter the official parade, were summarily rebuffed or ignored, and each year organized the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade that increased in size and began to look like any regular parade in Boston with floats, band, a trolley and the ubiquitous duck boat, all in the service of peace and justice. As the organization prepared for the 2015 event they took a different tack, decided not to waste any effort applying to the official parade officials, but also decided that the late afternoon in March (usually starting to march well after 3 o’clock) well after the crowds for the official parade had left and therefore were walking down sullen streets interfered with their right of effective free expression and applied to the City of Boston for a noon start time. 

That request was denied by the city and VFP thereafter filed a law suit in federal district court charging discrimination under the 1^st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and asked for injunctive relief requiring the city to grant the noon start time. A week before the parade date the federal judge turned down the request (although the legal civil case continues on). In response, as collectively agreed by the membership before the start of litigation, the failure to get the noon start time triggered the cancelling of the Peace Parade for 2015 (a stance which also dovetailed with the lawyers’ concerns about the court case adding fuel to their arguments about discrimination by the city).

A couple of days before the official parade was to start the AWC granted a gay rights organization’s application (Boston Pride) to march having previously granted the request of a group of gay veterans, OutVets to march. VFP and other peace groups were thus the only ones to have their parade rained on. Yeah, so Frank Jackman who over the previous four years had spent much time helping organize each parade, raising money, and a million other small tasks was not marching, and mad as hell about it. Do you blame him.  

The Sun Sets On The British Empire-Dame Judith Dench’s The Best Exotic Madrigal Hotel

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Best Exotic Madrigal Hotel, starring Dame Judith Dench, Maggie Smith, Dev Patel, 2012  

 

In the days of the Raj, in the days when the British ruled India with an iron fist, a massive naval fleet at the ready, and footloose soldiers of fortune (or rather of no fortune since the eldest son took all the dough and land and left younger brothers to the universities, the clergy, the civil service and the army) no one from the imperial center would have thought to retire to that benighted country. Rather they would spent their youth grabbing whatever they could grab and retire back in the old country in some at least modest splendor. Ah, but times have changed and John Bull has hit upon tough times as the denizens of this witty and thoughtful film demonstrate. Now the average Brit seeing his or her life circumstances at home reduced looked to the new emerging economic engine of the 21^st century the old Raj to make ends meet, or to just get away from the stale life in the home country. 

Of course the setting of this film in the old Raj, and in an old hotel that had seen better days with a cast of wayward elderly ex-patriates and a wacky entrepreneurial Indian allows the director and scriptwriter to investigate all kinds of subjects from multiculturalism to haughty vestiges of the old Empire refracted through new India, ageism, sexual impulses about the older set, adjusting (or not) to a new culture, old school closeted gayness, stale marriages, failed marriages and the aches and pains of growing old wherever you find yourself marooned. Somebody had to tell the story though and that is done through the thoughts of the narrator Mrs. Greensleeves (played by Dame Judith Dench) who had gone off to India to live cheaply since her late husband did not provide enough to keep her going, and to find herself of course. Along the way she does so although not without the usual problems of those who were sheltered from the world by old school marriage when hubby did, or didn’t, take care of everything. She finds herself, her presence helps a husband caught in a horrible and stale marriage find himself (and indirectly that scorned wife as well), helps a lonely old man finds love, helps a lonely old women continuing to hope to find love, and helps the Indian innkeeper to stand up for himself against the old India represented by his old-fashioned mother. All wrapped up in the bow of a hotel that had seen better days, and all relationships filled with if not happy endings at least hope as they fade. A feel good movie with a great ensemble cast well worth a couple of hours of your time.             

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

      

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best suit or best dress on when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which made the hymns make sense. Like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician told Mr. Beethoven and his ilk to move on over certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind).    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and got full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right and for a time on television, long after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment). No for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. He spoke of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley in Spain where it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done. That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

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

 

 

Peter Paul Markin comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity Forever and others like Deportee, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land  while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

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

So as the “dog days” continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

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

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.”  Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act, nor did I  have anything that happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.

I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

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

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

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen). Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll). Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaselly Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover, Mayor Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And Markin would surely endorse this sentiment. Enough.