The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Jack Callahan thought he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road that had much to do with his wanderings, got him going in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin called the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams I will do so here. That “crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings, that search had begun, and finished, about fifty years before when he left the road for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life.

But maybe it is best to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day” get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block from where Jimmy lives. We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, most recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking (drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys). The night I am talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think, mentioned that he had read in the Globe up in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart and did as thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 did and went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul Markin.

Yeah, we still moan for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our youths come up, it might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies” was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions). We would change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss,” like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past square one with girls in those days).            

Markin was whistling in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading the heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart Webber in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better then once a couple of Cambridge girls asked me if I liked it one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several month.

But enough of me and my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota). In a lot of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all, all except  in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”  Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.        

So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.               

Here the odd thing, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.           

But enough of the quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five kind of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read about how his hero Benjamin Frankin had started in the business, get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after about seven million drum-fire assault by Markin pressing him to read the thing.

So there he was by himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going  to hitchhike to save money and hell just to do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully started his trip on. There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French- Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of love was all about. Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the 1940s.

Ti Jean whose did not look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown, kind of blew that off when Providence seemed to provincial to him, had flew to New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters and hustlers. After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times that you would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book that was never published because there were to many squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.

Then Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.               

A View From The Left -The Class Struggle In Greece- A New York CIty Forum

You Will Pay-With The War Tax Resisters League In Mind

You Will Pay-With The War Tax Resisters League In Mind

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Steve Whipple and Brad Lucas had never had many arguments in their long association together. That “association” business to not put a too formal spin on the matter started long ago when they were first introduced at the children’s session of the York Hill Friends’ Meeting in Salem. While Sam had drifted away from the Quakerly ways in the late 1960s after many fitful nights and more than a few “heated” arguments with his late parents who had, to use a term of the times, freaked out, when he decided to quit the traditional Friends’ Meeting House in Cambridge and join the break-away younger set who met at the Harvard Divinity School and had never looked back they had remained steadfast friends even though Brad still kept the faith at York Hill. Of course brought up under the guidance of the “inner light” the tendency of the two men would have been to reason things out and if things could not be reasoned out then they would agree to disagree and let the matter rest or until the situation changed enough to warrant a change of heart on one or the other’s part.  

 

For the most part that is how they maintained their long-term friendship which beyond the association business already mentioned which they had no say in since their respective parents had belonged to the same York Hill Meeting had survived relatively unscathed by modern standards. Brad had supported Steve when he broke away from the Cambridge Meeting although he was not altogether sure of why the young radical Quakers needed to seek another space except like a lot of their generation one of the ways of expressing one’s independence was to automatically do the opposite of what one’s parents were doing. Brad had done the same when he decided to pursue an academic career rather than join his father in his accounting business. Brad had also supported Steve when at the height of the draft resistance despite the almost automatic military exemption that young Quaker men were entitled to as a historically recognized pacifistic religion he had refused to register in order to gain that exemption. As it turned out the government despite threats over his failure to register never prosecuted the case (probably assuming that some judge would throw the thing out for wasting governmental resources when there were plenty of non-Quaker draft resisters with no such history to fill the bastinado). And Steve in his turn had supported Brad when he decided that he would do “alternative service” out among the Puma Indians in Arizona rather than resist.

 

So just two gentle angry guys going about their respective businesses and keeping some kind of connection to the peace movement that they were almost from birth organically attached to. That is until the Iraq War blew up in their faces back in 2003 (really as the war clouds were forming in 2002 since they were among the first in Boston to publicly at Park Street Station, an historic protest location on the Boston Common, come out of their shells in the aftermath of 9/11 and say “no” to Bush 43’s damn war intentions). No, there had been no question about the need to organize and protest to the high heavens about the bogus reasons for the war but rather after the “slam-dunk victory” what to do when the pre-war mass opposition had dissipated.

See Steve and Brad were if nothing else children of the 1960s anti-war explosion in America as the senseless, merciless and bloody Vietnam War dragged on devouring the flower of both American and Vietnamese youth for no known purpose on the American side anyway (they were both somewhat sympathetic to the national aspirations of the Vietnamese despite the blood spilled). They had been as very young men (along with their respective parents) among the first few thousands (maybe less) who had marched through Central Park in New York under the auspices of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee calling for an immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam to the hoots and catcalls of “commie, reds, and traitors” by jeering passers-by. But they had also witnessed the increasing opposition from the young, mainly students, mainly men subject to draft induction and their friends and supporters, to the professors and academics, to elements of the political leadership, to the working-class people, and eventually to the housewives who stirred in righteous indignation. Finally as well in a sign that the whole project was doomed the anti-war fever got to the rank and file soldiers who had fought and bled in the war. So a growing and massive opposition evolved over time, maybe too long a time but evolved. Both men had been (have been) befuddled by the lack of opposition in the streets (where such matters as war and peace are resolved one way or the other) over time as the Afghan and Iraq debacles dragged on and on. It was almost in exact inverse relationship to the build-up of opposition over Vietnam. And hence Brad’s dilemma, or rather the government’s as he liked to put it.     

  

Brad (Steve too but he would have taken a different tack) had frankly had his fill over the previous several years of lonely small vigils on busy intersections around Boston or on the Common, had had his fill of teach-ins and shout-outs in university halls, had had his fill of arrests chained to the fence in front of the White House on snowy December days and humid spring nights in opposition to the various escalations and calls from troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan (calls still necessary under the theory of endless war by both the Bush and Obama administrations and probably the way things are going the next one too). So in 2011 he decided on his own as a symbolic material gesture of personal witness (which is the way the Quakerly like to put the matter) to stop paying his federal taxes, his war taxes as he called them, stopped being complicit with the war governments in the only real way that a private citizen acting on his or her own could protest the endless wars.   

 

The government, the IRS as the main collection agency of the government, is very jealous of is prerogative as far as collecting dough to keep the government running goes. So naturally when Brad had done the various maneuvers necessary to perk the government’s interest as to why a single-tax payer guy with a substantial income was not paying any taxes they went after him, tried all the various means they had to tie up every resource they could of his in order to get their blood money. The whole case is still in litigation and it has been a see-saw battle between Brad and the IRS so we will not know the final toll for a while. That part is not important, or of only lesser importance, compared to Steve’s getting “mad,” angry or whatever word you want to use to show that Steve though (thinks) that Brad’s actions were foolhardy and in the language of their youth, “elitist” and off-the-charts.

 

See Steve when he moved away from Quakerly ways also moved away from that “personal witness” business as a poor substitute for building mass actions (or trying to which is as important to him). That is why for the first time in a long time Steve and Brad have had an argument that has been brewing for a while now. Maybe an argument which will last as long as the endless wars. Yeah, maybe that long.         

 

[The story of the brother in the leaflet above, Matthew Hoh, presents another aspect of Brad Lucas’ argument. Personally I follow Joe Hill- Don’t mourn, organize!]

 

In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind

In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

No Regrets, narrated by Tom Rush and whoever else he could corral from the old Boston/Cambridge folk scene minute still around, 2014  

I know your leavin's too long over due
For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
It felt so strange to walk away alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms
Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone
I woke last night and spoke to you
Not thinkin' you were gone
It felt so strange to lie awake alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day
Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away
Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn
It feels so strange to lead my life alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

A few years ago in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia fit I, at the request of my old time friend, Bart Webber,  from Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston and close enough to have been washed by the folk minute, did some reviews of other male folk performers from that period. Other than Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour performer most people would still associate with that period, people like Tom Rush who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beat” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics of the bunch.

Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she)  and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Jesse Winchester, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it was will at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those heart souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2010 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.

And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary under review, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming burn down the building fire, just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”). So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this film.   

 

   

There Is A Wall In Washington …..With The Brothers Under The Bridge In Mind

There Is A Wall In Washington …..With The Brothers Under The Bridge In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris shed a tear that day, that hot sweaty humid even for Washington July day, an average Vietnam sweat day back in the day which he still wondered how he had survived, since he a Northern climes boy would perspire even lifting a few bags of groceries as a kid and learned the magic of deodorants early on, shed a tear down at the black granite (he could not say even now, out loud, out loud in public anyway Vietnam War Memorial so “black granite”). Shed more than one tear for his lost comrades, his fallen fellow soldiers, from those now receding but not forgotten years. Every time he went to Washington which over the previous few years had been mainly to protest something, the endless wars, the degradation of the environment, or the struggle for marriage equality he made sure that he paid his respects whatever the psychic drama he would feel for some time after. That last reason, the marriage equality one, the reason he was here this time, by the way, ironic proving some things can change in this wicked old world since he would often think with a flush of red about the days when he and his corner boys who hung around Miller’s Diner in the Tappan section of Troy, New York would mercilessly fag/dyke bait anybody who seemed the least bit homosexual (“light on their feet” a common expression for guys in those days). Did a couple of nasty things too to such people. Jesus. Every time though whatever the reason that he was in the nation’s capital for Ralph would force himself to go to the far end of the National Mall to shed his tears, and remember.   

Remember Jimmy Jasper from across the street, Van Dorn Street, in Troy, a good guy whom he had hung around in those Miller Diner’s days who, aside for his leadership of the fag/dyke baiting antics was a straight-shooter, would have your back in any situation and could back it up with plenty of two hundred and twenty pounds of pure heft and power, nothing fatty about him. Nothing fatty about his stance in the world either, a seriously patriotic kid, at least in those days when red-baiting anybody who said anything left of Ghenis Khan was suspected by him of being a “commie dupe” and subject to abuse only slightly less than fags and dykes, who when the word went out in 1965 for volunteers to stop the “red menace” in Vietnam was gung-ho, enlisted specifically as an infantryman figuring to get his share of kills and glory.

Ralph wasn’t sure, since he had lost contact with Jimmy after he went into the service and Ralph had drifted into his father’s high skill electrical business, whether he had changed his mind “in country,” probably not he was that kind of guy. Jimmy was one of the first guys from around Albany who took the hit, took it early in the war when such casualties were seen as part of the price of righteous battle, took some awful death from the reports that came back home down in the Mekong Delta where “Charlie” ruled both day and night. Charlie the name given to the Viet Cong enemy first with derision by the American soldiers when the build-up in that country looked like a cakewalk and later with some begrudging respect when it turned out he was willing to fight like hell for his land. In other parts of the country he, Charlie, ruled only at night, mostly. Something the Americans could never break for any length of time and all the wasted Jimmys could not change that. Yeah a tear for old Jimmy, and a trembling hand too.

Remember Tyrone Young and Sammy Preston, a couple of black kids from Harlem in his own unit up in the bloody Central Highlands. A couple of kids, kids who did not know each other back on the block around 125^th Street but who had been tight right through Basic and Advanced Infantry Training and wound up in the same unit as Ralph had. A couple of kids who saved his “white ass” (their term) a couple of time before they got waylaid on a patrol when they were all out on patrol in the “boonies,” where Tyrone and Sammy were on the point and the unit, at company strength for this action, was overrun by a battalion-sized DNV unit which had run in their unit by accident (at least that was the story from HQ when the Captain tried to explain why they were surprised and why guys like Tyrone and Sammy, just kids, “bought it” that day). Ralph always thought it was funny that Tyrone and Sammy pulled point whoever the Captain was. His unit had had three in the eighteen months he was “in country,” that last six months an extension to get out a few months early if he was still alive and that was the sole reason since by then he had become, quietly, very quietly, anti-war. He, like every guy, including Tyrone and Sammy, did not want to pull point duty since there was a greater danger of booby-traps and sniper action. It took a long while to figure out that blacks were pulling that duty a lot more than white guys and there was a racial component to that situation.

Funny, maybe ironic, since lately Ralph had become through his association with Veterans For Peace a supporter of the booming Black Lives Matter movement a thing that in his youth in the early 1960s when all hell was breaking loose in the Civil Rights movement, North and South, would have been impossible, totally impossible since he had spent those years standing side by side with his father, Ralph Morris, Senior to keep blacks from moving into the Tappan section of Troy. It took ten thousand nightly conversations with Tyrone and Sammy who had some sympathies with the Black Panthers although they were really just a couple of street kids to shake his white racist attitudes a little (and their black separatist attitudes and fear and distrust of whitey, him). It took that couple of “saving his white ass” situations though to get him straight that they were his brothers and not just some woe begotten street brothers back home in the “real” world. So a couple of tears and a trembling hand touching their names on that black granite.  

Remember Jed Caldwell, a white guy from Maine, another guy who “saved his ass” once (Jeff’s term but not with “white” in front of ass this time though). Jed loved motorcycles (as did it seemed every guy he or I ran into from up there), had a real passion for them not so much in the Hell’s Angel gang bang kickass sense but for the sheer joy of riding out in the misty Route One nights along the secluded (then) areas around Mechanicsville above Bar Harbor with this exotic Norton, a British bike Ralph understood. Just a poor tough kid, probably the toughest guy in the unit, from rural Maine. Here’s the kick though Jed’s passion wound up costing him his life when you think about it. Or maybe Jeff was just a “doomed” guy like Sammy always used to say, would say “doomed n----r” except white. See that bike cost plenty, plenty of money which he did not have since he was a son of a lobsterman, a father whom he hadn’t then seen in years. So Jed took to robbing stores, variety stores, gas stations, a couple of small banks which you could do then up in rural Maine Ralph guessed. Did it boldly from what he said like some small-time John Dellinger until he finally got caught. Got caught at a First National Bank heist solo, his only method of work, and at seventeen in 1966 got the “choice.” The judge choice-three to five for armed robbery in county or “go into the service.” Since Jeff said he wasn’t built for prisons and places like that he took the latter offer. Yeah shed a tear and another trembling hand on black granite for Jeff.              

Remember also a few years back hearing a song by his “Arky Angel,” Iris Dement whose Wall In Washington always evoked strong emotions in him when he heard the lyrics. The gist of those lyrics, lyrics written in the 1990s long after the conflict was over about those who had been left behind to take their hands and “trace” the name of their fallen loved one on that damn black granite, a bereft father himself a veteran of the big one, World War II and filled with that same gnawing red scare Cold War pride who had sent his son off without a doubt in what was supposed to be a fight to the finish against the bad guys in the world; a waiting girlfriend no longer to be wed married now with kids and happy but down for the museum tour and feeling a little of what might have been; a fretful mother who got that long lonesome knock at the door the military vehicle waiting on the curb and forever after a gold star in the window; and, a son conceived in a hot night of passion before his father shipped out who had never, and would never, know his father. Strong stuff.         

That “tracing” business something that he had constantly witnessed at the “black granite” with all kinds of grieving left behinds putting shaky hands to the wall and etching like the effort to trace the sacred name would bring the fallen back. Ralph said he could never bring himself to do that “tracing” for it was hard enough for his to press a kiss to the fallen he went to remember. Just brought up too many sad memories of guys who were as alive as he was then and now sat in some lonely graveyard in the towns and cities across America. So shed a tear for the fallen, and for his inability to trace those names too.    

Remember, always, always remember Kenny Morris, his younger brother Kenny, who had actually joined before him (theirs a patriotic family just like all the others back then, maybe questioning the government’s actions but not challenging them), had served with distinction in Vietnam (unlike him who was just lucky and had guys who saved his ass, white or otherwise) and got out alive like him. Got back to the “real” world in one piece for a while. Did okay for a couple of years, then the other shoe fell. Something snapped, some horror Kenny had witnessed or had taken part in the war got to him. It started when Kenny began setting fire alarms off at first overlooked by the family (and the justice system which had a skewed sense of how to honor service). Then the midnight walks naked going down Tappan Street. Eventually VA help, with drugs and therapy which kept his demons away, for a while. Then when that in the end failed institutionalization for a while. Kenny was eventually released when the trend was to get guys out of mental institutions. By then he was a shell of his old self, and Ralph having his own difficulties adjusting, a little family weary in any case, could not save a brother that had gone away from him. Then one night, a damn cold night out in the foothills of the Adirondacks he jumped off the Mohawk River Bridge. Gone. So yeah shed a tear for Kenny too. Yeah, there is no wall in Washington for Kenny, for Ralph to place his trembling hand upon ….but maybe there should be.      

 

Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart-With Blues Queen Janis Joplin In Mind

Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart-With Blues Queen Janis Joplin In Mind  

 

It was never stated in so many words by anybody Sam Lowell knew, never given some academic jargon mumbo-jumbo like it was when the sociologist, social historians and cultural anthropologists got their hands on the work long after the high tide of the 1960s had ebbed, had turned into a remnant rear-guard action by the ragged stragglers who would just not let go but they had lived under a certain sign, a certain way to navigate the world and seek out kindred. Perhaps being young and carefree Sam’s “youth nation” could not articulate the thing that way, maybe too afraid to speak of it out loud fearing to unleash some demons that they could not control. (Let’s call the phenomenon “youth nation” a term that today’s youth nation generation can relate to better since the advent of the great social media blast has elements of that older camaraderie rather than the more restrictive “hippie” or counter-culture generation since when the deal went down the numbers of hippies, the hip, did not have enough of a critical mass to keep everything going against the counter-offensive by those who were in charge yet many, many more of the young took snippets of what was offered, while not testing the limits of bourgeois society [Sam’s words for what was bothering him at the time]).

Those, like Sam who had initially gotten caught up in the doings (dope, politics, life-styles, a new ethos) by the late Peter Paul Markin, one of the corner boys from around Jimmy Jack’s Diner in growing up town Carver and an early Janis Joplin fan having seen her out in Monterrey on one of his hitchhiking trips to Big Sur when that place mattered in the youth nation configuration and who despite his many contradictions had a preternatural bead on what was coming down, who had been washed clean by the fresh new breeze that came through the country in the early 1960s lived under the sign of “live fast, die young and make a good run at it.” Some later cynics, or maybe the too candid made the third part “and make a good corpse” but that was when all hope that the “newer world” was upon us had faded like a tissue in the wind. A time too when the overwrought pile up of corpses from overdoses, crashed cars, suicides, and just plain “from hunger” wanting habits like Markin’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the deal went down, went down badly made that part of the mantra more explicable.

Nobody said it all in so many word, although Sam and the surviving corner boys hinted at that very idea, that living fast idea, one night after the definite word had come up from down in Sonora in late 1976 that Markin had cashed his check when they gathered at Jimmy Jack’s to mull things over and Frankie Riley, who had called Markin “the Scribe” in the old days had said some guys are “dead men on leave” and nobody contradicted him. But mostly nobody could articulate it that that way, maybe too afraid to speak of it out loud fearing to unleash some demons that could not be controlled lived under that certain sign in sullen wonder. To be old, old being over thirty to youthful twenty something eyes who saw the getting ahead career, wife and family in some leafy suburb drinking elegant wines writing on the wall, reflecting the phrase of the time taking direct aim at parents “don’t trust anybody over thirty,” meant “square,” a residue expression for the tail end of the “beat” generation which whether Sam and the guys knew it or not was their launching pad as they  came of age in that 1960s red scare Cold War night. That was Markin’s time really, the time of sensing the breeze not the mud of the breeze itself.  Meant too, meant as a signal far greater than Markin’s reach that if one did not imbibe in whatever one desired by the time they did get to thirty it would be too late, way too late.     

So Sam, Markin, Frankie, all the guys who stayed around long enough who had not been inducted into the service or to have married their high school sweethearts pursued their  outrageous appetites moved from the traditional working class neighborhood fashion dress statement , winter flannel /summer plaid shirt, chinos, black winter or summer, loafers or engineer boots (saved for rumbles, or threats of rumbles when turf was an issue way before dope smoothed such silliness out) and hair (boys’ regular Lenny the barber called it without  a whiff of irony) and liquor addictions (cheap rotgut wines, smoother Southern Comfort once the cheap wines lost allure, low-shelf whiskeys when some town wino would buy for underage them) to the new ones of the era (new at least to young mostly white eyes not familiar with old-time Billie Holiday New York café jazz needles and “beat” Village high tea time) with the emerging hip “drugstore” of every imaginable medication to salve the soul. Tried every kind of living arrangement as long as it drifted toward the communal (even on church-friendly floors and bedraggled Volkwagen bus campsites) and every kind of love, including the love that could not speak its name (this well before GLBTQ times). Tried every way to take dead aim at old bourgeois society and turn it upside down. Wanted to, desperately wanted to, listen to new music that reflected the new drug-induced karma that matched the chemicals spinning in their brains. No more rock and roll music, or any music, from Bobby Vee/Rydell/Darin, Fabian, Brenda Lee, Leslie Gore, Patsy Cline, that our parents might like, might even tolerate. Everything had be acid- etched.          

Sam had pegged it exactly right one night not long ago when he and some of the old gang who went through the 1960s experience were preparing for a Carver High class reunion when he told the gathering that “we sought to ‘live free,’ to break from convention and we expected out musical heroes (actually all of our heroes which in retrospect seemed of a piece with the outrageous appetites of the time) to partake of our newly established ethos, to lead the way. (That bit of wisdom despite the fact, to his occasional regret whenever he thought about what he could have done to “save” Markin, he had eased out of the “hippie” life-style in the early 1970s and snuck back into law school and that career track while Markin had held out to his visions for much longer.) They had expected their heroes like their slightly older brothers and sisters who went wild over brooding Marlon Brando, sulky James Dean, and moody Elvis to live high off the edge. And so they did, so anyway did what became the holy trinity come concert night, come party time, Jim (Morrison), Jimi (Hendricks), and Janis (Joplin). They lived hard, lived out there on the edge subject to their own doubts, subject like the rest of us to those rat ass things that formed our childhoods and would not let go and they needed release just like us. So Jim twirled the whirling dervish shamanic dance, Jimi fired up his grinding guitar and Janis, little Janis with the big raspy voice sang like some old-time barrelhouse blues mama reincarnate. Sang like the ghost of Big Mama Thornton had her back, like Bessie Smith was holding her place in the devil-is-going-to-get you blues pantheon. Gave us down-hearted blues to fill the heavens, gave us, well, gave us whatever she had to give with every little beat of her heart. Yeah, and they, she lived fast, and died, died way too young not matter what our ethos stated. Markin would have understood that, understood it in aces.      

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

 

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

 

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (and will again this year on her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.