Sam Lowell, considered himself a corner
boy from the time in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of
America were filled to the brim with such guys hanging out on the corners, in
his case North Adamsville not far from urban Boston. Here is the progression
not too atypical of corner boys with too little money and too much time on
their hands which underscored the corner boy 1960s night plight (and which
still plagues corner boys even though they no longer for the most part hang on
corners but malls and other places where there are not any “No trespassing,
police take notice” signs to harass young men still with not enough dough and
too much time on their hands). If you grew up in the Acre, Sam’s growing up
section of town you progressed from one place in elementary school, another in
junior high school when corners and who was on what corner started to get
sorted out in earnest, and high school where the corners were doled out hard as
steel in high school.
Places like South Boston (an all Irish
enclave then where even those who like Sam’s maternal grandparents had moved
out of the enclave to an Irish neighborhood in North Adamsville were considered
suspect, were looked at with jaundiced eye even by the relatives left behind),
Main Street in Nashua (at the time a dying city what with the mills heading
south to cheaper labor and eventually overseas and so a tough place to dream
in), New Hampshire, 125th Street in high Harlem< New York City (with all the excitement of jazz and be-bop
but with all the high segregation of the South except for the formality of
Mister James Crow’s laws), any of a
million spots on Six Mile Road in Detroit (never a place of dreams but of
steady work in the golden age of the American automobile for those from Delta
Mister James Crow black refugees to the Okie/Arkie white rabble coming out of
the hills and dustbowls), the same on Division Street in Chi town (the beat
street divide of many of Nelson Algren’s tales of drugs, urban lost-ness, and sullen
back streets disappointments), the lower end of North Beach beyond where the
“beats” of a few years before did their beat thing (the places where the
longshoremen and waterfront workers did their heavy drinking after work and
where the sailors off their Pacific ocean ships fought all- comers from the
Artic to the Japan seas).
Jack Slack’s was the last port of call
for the Acre crowd, for that motley collection of corner boys picked up and
discarded along the way although the core of Frankie , Jack, Jimmy, Allan,
Markin and Five-Fingers held throughout which had started at Doc’s Drugstore
complete with sofa fountain and shiny glass penny candy-case to draw selections
from after school to energize up for the real world activities of kid-dom
in elementary school, Miller’s Diner for the jukebox in junior high when they
were just becoming aware of girls, maybe having to dance with them, and maybe
trying to figure out, the eternal trying to figure out how to approach them
without them giggling back and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in early high school
before the new owners decided that unlike Tonio, the previous owner who sold
out to go back to Italy from when he came as a boy they did not want colorful rough-necked
boys standing one knee against the wall in front of their family friendly
establishment scaring the bejesus out of the important Friday and Saturday give
Mom a break family trade.
That time, those early 1960s times for
some reason known only to them, was time that you had best have had corner boy
comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and
Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed (that “comrade” not a word
to be used then in the tail end of the height of the red scare Cold War night
not if you wanted knuckle sandwiches from the unthinking patriotic guys but
that does convey the sense of “having your back” critical to your place in
those woe begotten streets).
That corner boy business extended
through the 1960s after high school for a couple of years when in addition to
being a corner boy Sam became a “flower child” along with his long mourned and
lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin heading out west on the hitchhike
roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade. (Markin who met a
horrible end down in sunny Mexico after the fresh breeze of the 1960s turned in
on itself and he got flat-footed by the backlash ebb tide riptide and could no
longer hold back his “from hunger” wanting habits held in check through
summers of love and a tight tour of Vietnam and made the fatal, very fatal,
mistake of trying to broker an independent drug deal and got two slugs to the
back of his head for the attempt.) Sam, now a sedate grandfatherly semi-retired
lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he
of late had been thinking about the 1950s, about not just those corner boy days
but about the music that drove every corner boy, including Markin, make that
perhaps most of all Markin, to distraction as they tried to eke out a sound
that they could call their own. A jailbreak sound that was not something their
parents would approve of at a time when titanic generational battles were
foaming at the mouth.
Thinking about the 1950s the times when
he came of age, came of musical age, an age very mixed up with that corner boy
comradery, that hanging at Doc’s and Miller’s Diner when he started noticing
girls and their charms (amid the first blush of giggles which he soon figured
out was their rational response to whatever was going on inside their bodies
just like guys like Sam were going through in their bodies). Those first
noticings started his life-long journey of trying to figure out what made them
tick, what they wanted, wanted of him, from a girl-less family making
everything that much harder. Noticing that they too hung around Miller’s in
order to play that fantastic jukebox which had all the latest tunes and plenty
of oldies too (oldies being let’s say we are talking about 1958 then maybe 1955
hits like Eddie, My Love, Rock Around The Clock, and Bo Diddley
showing that teen time, youth time anyway is measured differently from old man
lawyerly time, measured in days, weeks, months at the most-years were beyond
the pale) drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio
and their cranky old record player music.
Music in the teen households emphatically
not on Miller’s jukebox or there would have been a civil war no question, a
civil war avoided in his own home after his parents had bought, to insure
domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor
radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his
room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those
last year’s bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of
discussion (by the way in that small crowded upstairs bedroom, shared with his
two brothers, he found out he could discover the beauty of the “hold up to your
ear” transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly
scuffings).
More than that though, more than just
thinking about the old days like every old guy probably does, even guys who had
not been lawyers as a professional career, guys who you see sitting on park
benches, a little disheveled, maybe some crumbs in their unkempt beards,
feeding the birds and half-muttering to themselves about how when FDR was around
everybody stood tall, every country bent it knees in homage to America, or
else, or old bag ladies rummaging through trash barrels looking for long lost
lovers or their faded beauty Sam had been purchasing compilations of what are
commercially called “oldies but goodies” CDs. Doing so via the user-friendly
confines of the Internet, at Amazon if you need a name like today anybody,
except maybe three people up in heathen Alaska or the Artic, doesn’t know
that is the site to get such material these days instead of traipsing over half
the East Coast trying to cadge a few examples from the dwindling oldies and
used records emporia, and purchasing several record compilations of the
“best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to
date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and
old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s
blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of
rock and roll.
Sam had to laugh about that situation
back in the day as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back
holding up the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, on many of those
date-less, date-less because although he might have been an all “hail fellow,
well met” hard-assed corner boy full of bluster and blah he was sister-less and
hence baffled by girls and their ways and very shy around the question of
asking for dates although he was quite willing to tell each and every girl who
would listen to him about ten thousand fact on any of sixteen subjects, not
excluding science, philosophy, and the poor fate of the Red Sox then. Although
those ten thousand facts would come in handy when he got to college a couple of
years later and he had girls hanging off the walls in debate class waiting for
him to ask them out then those precious facts did not add up to a date by
osmosis but rather incomprehension even by girls like Patty Lewis and Mary Shea
who liked him and would have be glad if he asked them for a date without the
ten thousand facts, thank you.
Here though is something about the
mores of the time that young people today might not comprehend girls just
waited for guys to make a move, or moved on to the next guy who would,
especially if he had a boss ’55 Chevy, like Patty and Mary did. Also girl-less
(already explained but here the question is having a serious girl and the just
mentioned facts will hold here as well), and dough-less (self-explanatory in
working-class North Adamsville, the sorry fate of the working poor, the
marginally employed like his father, no money when the rent was due and Ma had
not money for the damn rent collector much less discretionary money for dates
with girls) on Friday and Saturday nights when he proclaimed to all who
would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan
and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who all wondered what he
was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”
Mainly, through the archival marvels of
modern technology, pay-per-song, look on YouTube, check out Amazon Sam had been
right, rock and roll had not died although it clearly no longer provided the
same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish, techno music, or edge
city rock. But Sam always though it funny when kids, his grandkids, for
example, heard (and saw) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in some
film clip to make the older almost teenage girls among them almost react like
the girls in his time did when they saw him on the Ed Sullivan Show and
had half-formed girlish dreams about personally erasing that snarl from his
face. Especially that flip clip of the prison number in Jailhouse Rock. Bo
Diddley proclaiming to the whole wide world that he in fact had put the rock in
rock and roll and who could dispute that claim when he went bonkers in some
Afro-Carib number with that rectangular guitar. Say too Chuck Berry telling a
candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then,
now too from what Sam had heard from his grandchildren, that Mister Beethoven
from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and his cronies and move
over because a new be-bop daddy, a new high sheriff was in town, was taking the
reins, making the kids jump on jump street. Ditto curl-in-hair Buddy Holly
pining away for his Peggy Sue.
Better, mad monk swamp rat Jerry Lee
Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world
that Chuck was putting on fire everybody had to do the high school hop bop,
confidentially. And how about Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time
and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy over.
Yeah, those kids, those for example grandkids jumping around just like the
young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah,
jumping around for those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the
1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he
came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation something no
generation seems to be able to escape since the world had no less dangerous, no
less incomprehensible today.
Sam had thought recently about going
back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by
demographically savvy media companies that he had purchased on Amazon to cull
out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost
continuously since the 1950s (the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great
last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one
dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the
Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and
she was wondering, maybe still is, when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and
leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples
that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love
or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by listening to the
compilations to be remembered.
But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally
found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in
memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that
went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can
imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed
that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he
(or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the
better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent
artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous
drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples
but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor
or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when that “youth
nation” cohort gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs,
stale popcorn, or fizzled out sodas, although who cared, especially if that
three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in
Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.
That is how Sam played the game. Two
(or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others could
fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of
interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND
jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours’ or
father-borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers,
ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name
your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall,
waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he
or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one all
dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking
out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who
counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she
said they would be there, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your
bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult
eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in
the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no
more explanation needed, right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls
looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss”
Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at
the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when you were younger and at night
when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and
add scenes too.
