The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind

Sketches From The Pen Of  Frank Jackman  

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man

[Chorus:]
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
Well, you never do nothin' to save your doggone soul

Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
You look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice

[Chorus]

I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I can look at you, tell you don't love me no more

I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
The more I work, the faster my money goes

[Chorus]

Shake, Rattle And Roll

 …she had been through it all before, six or seven times now at least,  been through the part about what happened to her when she heard the new music, heard the music that was not some left-over parent music fit for mercifully sleeping through, maybe, on the radio, some called it rhythm and blues, music from the black ghettos of places like Chicago and Detroit from guys who had come up from the South in the great post-World War I migrations to shake one Mister James Crow off their backs, get the jobs in the bustling factories to make some damn money for once to buy Missy what she wanted, came up to get away from what she heard some say was Mister’s plantations sweat all day cotton boll work and his same Mister James Crow legal system (although she understood the sweat work part she didn’t understand that Jim Crow part at all, didn’t understand what it meant, didn’t understand that it affected every legal, social, economic, and political move they made) and turn that country blues of their fathers and other brothers, that down home Saturday night juke joint drinking Jimmy Jack’s homemade liquor on electric-less guitars, into sassy electrified blues for a more sophisticated urban audience ready to dust off their roots. 

Working off the efforts of old preacher-warriors Son House (had heard or read she was not sure that he had warred against the devil against sin and warred against God with the bottle), Charley Patton, Skip James and the guy who made a pact with devil she heard down in some Mississippi sweat-hole highway, Robert Johnson. And they did work, worked the streets for pocket money first and then the little sassy clubs, all smoke, booze and smelling of blood. Guys like sainted Muddy and hell-fire Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, a bunch of James’ first or last name, John Lee, and some others too. Sometimes she would hear the sounds the threading-twanging sounds and get, well, get a little jumpy thinking what it would like to be stage front when old Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf got it on, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she ever took step one in that direction.       

Some called the new dispensation sound rockabilly with good-looking white farm and small town boys named Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee, Warren,    in sexy suits with nothing on their minds except good times, music, and sex who were tired of that Grand Ole Opry hokey stuff and wanted to breakout and dust off their roots too. She thought about being stage front when those guys played too and thought that she too would maybe throw her sweaty underwear up on that heathen stage like she had seen and heard that lots of girls, good girls too caught in the throughs of the moment, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she took step one in that direction. In any case some, more recently, had begun to call it rock and roll after some DJ, Freed she thought the name was from New York City or some big beat city, called it that and it was starting to catch on as the way to describe the beat, the dancing, and the feeling of freedom just being around the scene.

Her parents, her know-nothing parents, just called it the “devil’s music,” called it an abomination against God’s will but they called everything from the “red menace” from Russia, Uncle Joe’s an dhis minions menace, to fluoride in the water some kind of abomination against God’s will so she discounted what they had to say, what did they know anyway, what could they know about what she felt, what she felt in the certain private places of her body when the beat got strong. How could they know never having been young, never having had those feelings. She was not exactly sure why she felt that way if anybody had asked her to explain those feelings (and nobody would, or almost nobody, since they were as clueless about why they felt that way when the music came on as she was), why she felt warm in what all the girls in the before school “lav” called their “sweet spot” with a tittle whenever she heard the local radio station or the kids at Doc’s 

Drugstore over on Atlantic Avenue on the juke-box endlessly playing Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll or Warren Smith on Rock and Roll Ruby but she did. (Some of the rougher girls whom she avoided, the girls who smoked, drank and did “it,” so they said, called it other things which she did not find out until later, much later, guys called those things too but she then still preferred the more modest “sweet spot.”) All she knew was that when the beat began to pick up she would start swaying, maybe dancing by herself, maybe with a girlfriend, and get that feeling like she was not in has been dusty Olde Saco but maybe in New York City getting checked out by all the cute boys there whose leers when she swayed would have told her they were interested in having some of her.

Someone, Betty, she thought, a girl that she had grown up and gone to school with,  gone to Olde Saco High with, said it was just her coming into “her time,” although she did not know what to make of that idea since she had that same feeling before and after she came into her time. Got her “friend.”  Betty, or whoever it was who had said it said she did not mean that, that thing every girl had to deal with, but the time when everything was confused and when a teenager did, or did not, know which way to jump. Betty said somebody on the news programs called it alienation, teen alienation, like it was a disease, an epidemic sweeping the nation that needed to be eradicated if we were to beat the Russkies or something like that, but she was not sure what that meant. All she knew was that the old songs on the jukebox or radio, the ones that she loved to listen to the previous year, Frank getting kicks on champagne, Bing crooning about going his way, Patti get all dreamy about ocean-filled Cape Cod making her forget about ocean-filled Olde Saco with its endless textile mills to break the mood, Rosemary telling everybody to come to her house and singing about wanderlust, did not make her feel that way anymore. Didn’t make her feel that she wanted to jump out of her skin.

Tommy from school she thought, thought fondly if anybody was asking although he had not shown a spark of  interest until recently so she might not have told them she thought fondly of him if they had asked, might have had a better handle on it, have had a better sense of what turbulence was going on inside her when he told the whole Problems in Democracy class in Current Events that there were some new songs coming out of the radio, some stuff from down south, some negro sound from down in Memphis somewhere, some white hillbilly sound from around that same town, that he would listen to late at night on WJKA from Chicago when the air was just right. Sounds that made him want to jump right out of his skin. (She never dared to ask, ask even later when she got to know him better, whether it made him feel warm in his “sweet spot” since she didn’t know much then about whether boys had sweet spots, or got warm).

When Tommy had said that, said it was about the music, she knew that she was not alone, not alone in feeling that a fresh breeze was coming over the land, although she, confused as she was would not have articulated it that way (that would come later). And so she asked Tommy about it after class, asked him about what it felt like for him to jump out of his skin when he heard the beat beginning. He explained to her his feelings, feelings that she said she shared with him and he smiled. She agreed to let him walk her home after school and they had talked for a couple of hours on her front porch before he left. This went on most days for a while since neither one was assertive enough to ask for a date for a long time (Tommy as painfully shy as her except she was the first to notice that he looked over her way in class and gave a little smile, really a half smile before that day when they first talked after school).

Then both saw the big full page announcement in the newspaper, in the Friday edition Daily Gazette, for the next dance around town scheduled for a week from Saturday night and that night she called him to see if, ah, they might go to the event together. If she had waited about ten minutes Tommy later told her he would have called her (in her mind though she thought she was right to call since he was, except during Current Events, painfully shy and she was not going to miss a chance to grab him before some other girl did and then where would she be). And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, play the new music that Tommy talked about some much. She wondered to herself (she could not speak of such things to Tommy) as she prepared for that night whether she would feel warm again in her sweet spot when they danced, she hoped so…         

But let’s catch up with Tommy for a moment and see what he is thinking about (oh, besides her, since we already know a lot especially about that telltale half smile he kept throwing her way).  

… things were different now, different from a few months ago when he was all balled up and thought he was the only kid, guy or female, aged fifteen, who was confused, uncomprehending, misbegotten about how he felt, about his place in the universe and about how he felt so very sorry himself because he didn’t understand what was happening to him, and what spoke to him now that he was no longer a kid. He, Tommy Murphy, could hardly wait until the weekend, wait to hear the new sounds coming out of the south, rhythm and blues stuff, rockabilly stuff, that he kept hearing on his transistor radio up in his room on clear nights out of WJKA in Chicago, stuff that people were starting to call rock and roll because some hip DJ in New York City or some such place a lot of people were taking credit for the term called it that, was starting to catch on. Funny he thought how he could get Chicago on good nights, weekend nights, but not New York City to hear that DJ call out to all the cats to swing to the beat of rock and roll. Mister Gibbs, his science teacher explained it to him and the class one time but the explanation sounded like someone talking to the heathens about heaven.

He couldn’t get WJKA clear every week, damn, but when it did come in Tommy would start snapping his fingers to the beat, the swinging beat that “spoke” to him somehow. He could not explain it but it made him feel good when he was down, was all confused about life, okay, okay, about girls, school, and that getting ahead in the world that his parents, his mother especially kept harping on. Made him think that maybe he would be a musician and play that stuff, play and make all the girls wet. Yeah, he knew all about that part about girls, about how this rock and roll music was making them get warm, warm in all the right places according to George his older brother who knew all about girls. Had them, girls, hanging off of him even though he wasn’t a musician but just a hep cat. Make that new girl of his, Susie, warm too. He hoped.

Funny how he had met Susie, how they had met, or not really met but started out, started out in school of all places, in class. Jesus. He had noticed her before but before she was just part of that all balled up stuff he was feeling, although he had taken a few peeks at her and he thought she might have peeked back once but he was not sure. Then during Current Events in Problems in Democracy class one week it was his turn to make a presentation and he chose to talk about that radio station out in Chicago and about the sounds he heard that made him want to jump out of his skin. He couldn’t exactly explain why and blushed a bright red when the teacher, a cool guy, Mr. Merritt asked him point about why he felt that way except to say that it made him feel good, made him less angry, less confused. A couple of people in the class nodded and he thought Susie had too (although she later said “no” she hadn’t nodded she just was thinking how brave he was to talk like that about his reactions to the music and while looking at him found out something she had not noticed before, he was cute). 

After class Susie had come up to him and practically begged him to tell her more about his feelings, about how the music made him feel,   because she said when she heard Big Joe Turner coming all snapping fingers on the radio on Shake, Rattle and Roll, she felt funny inside. Of course nobody, not even Tommy, who was keen on such knowledge knew that Big Joe was a Negro then, Christ his parents, good Roman Catholics who theoretically thought well of all mankind would have fits if they knew that he was listening to Negros under any conditions just like most RC parents in the neighborhood.  Tommy knew what kind of funny Susie was talking about, her “sweet spot” funny but he knew, knew because George had told him, not to say that to girls. Not modest girls like Susie and maybe not any girl if you wanted to get past first base with them. 

That conversation had started their thing and she asked him to walk home with her so they could talk which they did until they got to her house and just stood there talking for a couple of hours before he left.

He had walked her home a few times and he found that she was easy to talk to but they both seemed to back off on talking about a first date. He knew that he was a little shy in that department and he guessed Susie was too. Then both of them saw an announcement in the newspaper for the next big dance around town and one night she had called him to see if, ah, they might go together. (He somewhat flabbergasted said “yes,” said yes knowing that if he did not some other guy would grab her and then where would he be.) And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, the Ready Rollers, play the new music. Tommy  didn’t know what would happen as he prepared that night to pick her up at her house but he hoped the music would calm him down and that he would get that funny feeling inside when they danced, and her too, he sure hoped so…      

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! Build The Resistance!

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! Build The Resistance!   

Frank Jackman comment:

As I pointed out in the headline the idea of “divesting” from the dead weight of the Pentagon overlay on society’s resources is the beginning of wisdom. Hell, a nice idea until you figure out that the military-industrial complex that old-time President Eisenhower, a recipient of much military largess in his time, railed against is degrees of magnitude far greater than the “skimpy” role it played in society in his day. For leftist militants, for anti-imperialist fighters, heck, for just rational people the real beginning of wisdom is to not to “tweak” this or that aspect of the complex but to smash it, smash it utterly. There is no other way so when you thing about this slogan-think about what is behind it. The task. Think too that you will be about being a slayer of some very big monster-and there will be blowback. For now that is enough said.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! -Build The Resistance! 

From The Partisan Defense Committee-32nd Holiday Appeal Fundraiser For Political Prisoners In New York City January 27, 2018

From The Partisan Defense Committee-32nd Holiday Appeal Fundraiser For Political Prisoners In New York City January 27, 2018 

Two Minutes to Midnight – Doomsday Clock Standout Friday, January 26 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm ~ Harvard Square T Entrance

Two Minutes to Midnight – Doomsday Clock Standout

Friday, January 26 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm ~ Harvard Square T Entrance

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has been moved to 2 minutes to midnight.  This is a shift forward – it is back to 2 minutes to Doomsday – as close as the clock has ever been!!  

In recognition of this fearsome and solemn moment in human experience, there will be a standout calling for nuclear disarmament on Friday, January 26 at 5:30-6:30 in Harvard Square, Cambridge by the T station.  Hudson Valley Sally will join us to lead some sing-alongs as we protest!  

Some reasons for the Doomsday Clock being moved forward are:  

Nuclear:

All nuclear nations are updating arsenals, lowering threshold for use and are emphasizing nuclear capability

All Treaties are under fire and in trouble

• US-Russian no negotiations underway and there will be no negotiations for foreseeable future
• START treaty is not being extended
• Landmark Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty on the rocks
• Iran nuclear deal being undermined by Pres. Trump

Climate change:

• Serious and increasing threat of warming is as dangerous as nuclear annihilation
• Arctic winter ice cap smallest ever – 3 years in a row
• U.S. withdrawal from Paris Agreement

We heed this warning from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  We call on world leaders to stop making nuclear threats, particularly the US President who tweets nuclear threats regularly against North Korea. 

We call for:   

• Taking all nuclear weapons off high alert
• All nuclear nations to sign onto the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty  – This treaty, which opened for signature by nations on September 20, 2017 prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.
• Fulfilling of obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in which Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
• Ending the more than trillion dollar modernization of nuclear weapons, currently underway that is spurring a new arms race and building “lower yield” nuclear weapons that are more likely to be used.  
• And we call on all people who live in nations with nuclear weapons to join in the streets in nonviolent protest, in the halls of Congress, and/or Parliaments, and demand an end to (nearly) 73 years of atomic/nuclear tyranny.

We will not get to decide whether nuclear weapons are used.  These horrific weapons could be used in error, in a fit of pique, by tweet or for consolidating power, with deadly consequences.

--

"Not one step back"

Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace organization

11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

617-354-2169 w

617-466-9274 m

www.masspeaceaction.org

Facebook: facebook.com/masspeaceaction

Twitter: masspeaceaction

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January 12, 2018

https://www.ucsusa.org/press/2018/leaked-nuclear-posture-review-lays-out-policy-changes-would-increase-risk-nuclear-war?_ga=2.84183834.2048547799.1516029395-499250886.1516029395#.WlzGBnm1uUl

Leaked Nuclear Posture Review Lays Out Policy Changes That Would Increase Risk of Nuclear War

Statement by Lisbeth Gronlund, Senior Scientist, Co-director Global Security Program, Union of Concerned Scientists

WASHINGTON (January 12, 2018)—A draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the Huffington Post indicates that the White House is planning changes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its nuclear-use policy that would increase the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.

Below is a statement by Lisbeth Gronlund, senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The new policy laid out in this document is dangerous on multiple levels. It’s a shocking and explicit rejection of decades of bipartisan consensus to reduce the role and number of U.S. nuclear weapons, which led to large-scale reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and reduced the risk of nuclear use.

“This new policy would make nuclear war more likely and undermine national security. It would expand the range of scenarios under which the president could decide to use nuclear weapons. It intentionally lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by calling for the development of several new types of more ‘usable’ nuclear weapons, including one that could be deployed on submarines in the near future. It also calls for tighter integration of U.S. nuclear and conventional forces, which deliberately blurs the line between them and eliminates a clear nuclear firewall.

“All of this comes on top of an existing plan to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal at a cost of more than $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. At a time when the majority of nations are calling for reducing the role of nuclear weapons, this plan justifies new weapons and uses for them and is a dramatic step backward.

“Every U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has explicitly reduced the role, the types and the number of U.S. nuclear weapons. This leaked draft lays out a policy that does exactly the opposite. It would increase the risk of nuclear use and reduce national security.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems. Joining with people across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future.

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The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They- With Elvis’ Version Of Harbor Lights In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They- With Elvis’ Version Of Harbor Lights In Mind

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights

They only told me we were parting

Those same old harbor lights

That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights

How could I help it?

Tears were starting.

Good-bye to golden nights

Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,

And kiss you just once more.

But you were on the ship,

And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights

For all the while my heart keeps praying

That someday harbor lights

Will bring you back to me.

***********

Some people have asked, although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, before what is now called the classic age of the genre. Usually such people are young, or were born well after what is now called the classic age of rock and roll became the classic age. So they ask was there music before hip-hop nation beat down the doors, or if any other genre that has struck their interest like techno-rock that might have formed the basis for their question. In fact having thought about the question for a while I got jolted one day when I listened on the radio to an interview with a famous classic rock star who put the question a different manner-will rock and roll ever die? His answer, and this is the part that shocked me for a moment, was there would always be a niche, a niche for Chrissakes, for rock even as now it has moved from the center of the music universe. The shock coming from my own impression that rock and roll as an old time song had it would never die. So rock will fade to the sidelines and be just another piece of entertainment like our pre-rock parents and their swing and jitter-buggery.    

But rock, rock as I knew it, I, Frank Jackman, who lived for the latest 45 RPM records (those were single song two- sided pieces of vinyl which you can find examples of on YouTube when somebody puts a classic rock song up) to hit the stores along with my corner boys was the basis for the question back then. Back in the 1950s when the world was young and America, young America, still had that capacity to wonder before the lamp went out in the next decade. Wonder just like Scott Fitzgerald pointed out about those who founded places like New York City, the Mecca for a lot of things, including the production of those 45 RPM records that I mentioned. People like those Dutch sailors with the Van names must have felt when they saw that “fresh green breast of the new world” coming up the Long Island Sound. And wondering rightly so since what we heard before, heard to perdition was some vanilla stuff that our parents liked but I will get to that later.

In other words time, new millennium time, has left classic rock for the aficionados or for, well, old fogies, you know the AARP-worthy denizens whose demographics form the basis for rock musical compilations and “oldies but goodies” revivals with now ancient heartthrobs from back in the day who have lost a step or three coming out on some massive dwarfing stage bright lights lit and lip-synch, yes, lip-synch their greatest hits (or hit in the case of those important musical one-hit johnnie and janies who formed more of the industry than usually is acknowledged). But there, believe it or not, but “take my word from me” like old Rabbit Brown used to say his song James Alley Blues, were other types of music, music that helped formed rock and roll that I found out about later after I had had my fill of 45 RPM records and corner boys and wanted to dig into the history of the American songbook, see what drove earlier generations of the young to seek their own jailbreak out from their parents music.     

So of course there was music before rock, I had better say classic rock so nobody gets confused, and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues around the turn of the century, the 20^th century, when all those freed slaves who thought they were economically free and not just manacle-free wound up working for Mister in his twenty-eight thousand acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi for a pittance. Kept in line, and here is where the bitch of the thing is by a guy, well, not really a guy but a way of life, a legal, political, economic and social way of life, named after a guy maybe, one Mister James Crow, and so those freed blacks who slaved on Mister’s land had to blow off steam and that was the basic of the blues, and I don’t mean blues like when a guy has a good girl who done him wrong on his mind. Hell that problem was easy to solve. What I mean is when Mister, or his Captain, pushed the pace all week (half a day Saturday included) and every worthy buck and every good-looking gal, big thighed or not, hit Jimmie Jack’s juke joint to listen to some itinerant brother with a broken down guitar (hell maybe just a board and string if times were tough) wail away about that damn Captain, his, the singer’s, unfaithful women and about how “the devil’s gonna get him” if he didn’t stop chasing those very women, drinking that applejack, and gambling his wages away in some back alley crap shoot, for nickels and dimes in the pot (and some of Jimmie Jack’s homemade brew) and got the crowd swaying and clapping their hands to the beat on See See Rider or Mississippi Highwater Rising. Yeah, that’s the start. Okay.

Too far back for you, too much root? Okay let’s travel up the river, the Big Muddy, maybe stop off at Memphis for a drink, and to nurse the act, before hitting the bitch city, Chicago, hog butcher, steel-maker and every other kind of tool and appliance-maker to the new industrial world just ask Carl Sandburg. But also maker by proxy of the urban blues, those old hokey plantation Son House/Charley Patton/ Blind Blake (and a million other guys with Blind in front of their names) juke joint Saturday night full of homemade blues turned electric with the city and turned guys like plain boy Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (you would laugh at their real names although you would not do that in their presence, especially the Wolf because he would cut you bad, real bad) into the kings of  Maxwell Street and all the streets around with back-up and all putting just the right twist on Look Yonder Wall, Rocket 88, Hoochie Goochie Man and Little Red Rooster (with kudos to Willie Dixon on that one too but first heard not by Wolf but by the “classic” rock the Stones, so how is that for cache). So, yeah, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities

Jazz too maybe a little Duke and Benny swing as it got be-bopped and hurried up the beat, for the drum action, for the “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing” that took over after a while once the old tine Scott Fitzgerald Jazz Age got waylaid by the Great Depression and World War II. But Dizzy, Charlie, Thelonius too with that cool, detachment mood that spoke to the beat down, the beaten down, the big blast beaten fellahin world. Certainly throw in rhythm and blues, north and south, throw in big time one Mister Big Joe Turner toot-tooting his sweet mama to Shake, Rattle and Roll that had all those alienated, angst-ridden white guys (whether they knew they were alienated or not like some model James Dean) lined up to cover the damn thing. Yeah guys like Elvis (when he was young and hunger working the hayride circuit for nickels and dimes, and an off-hand willing woman), Bill Haley when he needed to kick his act up a notch, and Jerry Lee when he needed to put fire into that piano.

Then came alone a strange mix and match, rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South, Tupelo, Biloxi, Lake Charles, Lafayette, a little Cajun thrown in. Jesus, the smaller the town it seemed the more the guys wanted to breakout, wanted to push the envelope of the music, wanted to get away from that “from hunger” look, wanted that big bad Caddy they saw in the golden age of the automobile magazines. Came out with those same boys lining up to sing Joe Turner, hungry Elvis, Carl, Johnny, Jerry Lee, to sing black along with that good old boy Saturday night moonshine tucked in the back seat of that bad ass Chevy looking, looking for danger, and looking for women to sing to who were looking for danger. Country boys, yeah, but not hokey George Jones country boys these guys wanted to breakout of  Smiley’s Tavern over on Highway One, wanted girls to dance on the tables, wanted guys to get up and dance with those Rubys and red-headed girls. Yeah, they mixed it and matched like big time walking daddies (and I hear had fun doing it, hell, it beat eking out a living clerking at Mister Smith’s feed store.  

What rock and roll owed little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to, is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. You know Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Over The Rainbow stuff. That part of the songbook seems to me to be a different trend away from that jailbreak song that drove us wild and one that was reflected in a CD compilation review I did one time (for the young, maybe the very young, CDs were discs loaded with a bunch of songs, some you liked, maybe three, and the  rest you had to buy as well because you desperately wanted those three not like today when you just hopped on some site to grab something you liked one at a time and download it, presto), The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which really was about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Yeah, not exactly stuff your parents liked but stuff that maybe was good if you a “hot” date that did not turn out well and you listened to it endlessly on your defeated way home. Yeah, let’s be clear about that, that stuff your older brothers and sisters already halfway to that place where your parents lived swooned over, not you.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought or waited impatiently at home World War II, and listened to swing, jitter-buggery things and swooned (they really did check YouTube if you don’t want to take my word from me) over big bands, brass and wind swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that got us moving to break out and seek a newer world, to try to scratch out an existence in a world that we had not say in creating and dream, dream do you hear me, about turning the world upside down and keeping it that way for once. I remember writing in that review that the music in that compilation drove me up a wall and I was ready to shoot my CD player, the instrument that I heard it on, once I heard it (younger reader just put “shoot your iPod” and we will be on the same page.

No, this was the music that reflected, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word exists) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, they found out that you could let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. Mostly. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened to them then like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On that compilation Harbor Lights was done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause number one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, when he was young and hungry while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. No young women would get all wet, would get all sweaty and ready to throw their underwear at the drop of a hat for Sammy’s version. Elvis you know or heard about what women were ready to do. Case closed. And the compilation only got worse from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said. 

When The World Lived For Film Noir Heaven-With The Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” In Mind

When The World Lived For Film Noir Heaven-With The Film Adaptation Of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” In Mind

By Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs

[Ever since I came on board on this site as site manager first taking over the day to day operations, handing out assignments, editing, researching that sort of thing and then when Allan Jackson retired the whole operation I have tried to do some innovations both in the way the work was assigned and how it was presented.*There was a rough period of some serious internal struggle between the old guard who had hung on Jackson’s every word and received whatever assignments they liked many times taking whatever struck their collective fancies and submitting to be automatically rubber-stamped by Jackson and the guys who have come to be known in urban legend around the office water cooler as the “Young Turks” who had to take the old guard’s leavings-or else.

Frankly as a result of what I would call nepotism, there is no other word for it although Allan claimed it was impossible since that term only dealt with feathering family nests, all the plum assignments were reserved for those whom he had grown up with him in the old working-class of North Adamsville or had met on the highways during the turbulent 1960s beginning with the well-known Summer of Love, 1967 centered in San Francisco. That hard fact true even when of necessity due to retirements and tiredness he had to bring in a cohort of younger writers who wound up mostly doing rehash jobs on what the old guard left behind. Not a good situation which in the end was the undoing of Jackson since the self-styled “Young Turks” rose up to smite the dragon and he left packing his bags for parts unknown vowing revenge unto to the seventh generation. More importantly, leaving me to try to pick up some pieces.

The first of which was to cut way down, cut down to nothing in the end on the proliferation of titles hanging on each and every writer. After an unsuccessful trial run as describing everybody as self-evident “writer” we have gone to simple given and surnames in the by-line line. The second, to be kind to myself, we are still trying to work out, by having both young and older writers write out of their comfort zones. If you wrote about old time films, which was fine by me coming over from the American Film Gazette where we did a million of those, then try your hand at more modern stuff. That is where as they say “the rubber hit the road.” Where there was almost another civil war here headed on their respective sides by the two writers who will do the review below.

In order to placate both parties who wanted to do this fantastic review of one the super-classic all-time great movies I decided to have both give their takes on the film and together glean the high points through mutual rebuttals. Kenny, having done that kind of thing at his last job agreed without a fight. Phil reared up on his high horse and bucked me every minute until I threatened to put him back on probation which would have meant “doing penance” writing about some zombie film, or worse having to do some television series reviews. Needless to say he saw the light of reason after that. So below is the experiment in its first glow with each take first and then some play by play. Greg Green     

*There has been a persistent undercurrent around the shop about what actually happened to Allan Jackson in the internal dispute. That situation got a big push by both sides when Allan wound up in Utah doing stringer work for some Mormon publications. The old guard called it a purge, an exile, thinking that this little hiccup was on the order of the Stalin-Trotsky fight during the Russian Revolution period since most of them, along with Allan, had been at least around the fringes of serious leftist groups in their youth after they shed their Summer of Love dope-addled goggles. The “Young Turks” a little more vicious having had to hold fire under the Jackson regime or they would have been in Utah or North Dakota themselves also called it openly a purge. Were glad once the old goat was gone to revel in their victory.

The truth? Remember I was the distinct beneficiary of his demise. Allan would not have retired, no way, and I had many talks with him about it before the hammer came down on his poor misunderstanding head, unless he had been voted out by the coterie of writers, including the vote, the decisive one, of his oldest friend Sam Lowell who said it was time to “pass the torch.” In Sam’s words “nobody under about sixty gave a fuck about all the bright shining stuff that the 1960s was supposed to represent before it all turned to dross.” So maybe it was a purge but a soft-core one if you think about the matter. ]           

Phil Larkin’s The Maltese Falcon take:

Forget all the bullshit about crime doesn’t pay that always comes with the package in these kinds of films whether it is the 1940s or now (hell the “crime doesn’t pay” gag goes all the way back to the Garden, back to Adam forcing Eve to grab the brass ring, a no-no, and maybe even before that). Forget too all the nonsense about a guy, a guy in the low-life key-hole peeper private detective racket upholding the honor of the profession, Jesus, profession he called it, and having to move heaven and earth to find the nasty killer of his partner. That is strictly for the sob sisters and terminal flick junkies like the so-called protagonist Sam Spade could have given a fuck about old Miles when he was playing footsie with Miles’ wife and had his name stricken from the world about two seconds after he dropped by the office and had his Girl Friday do the deed after Miles has taken a couple of well-earned slugs for being skirt-crazy. Forget too writing off Brigid or whatever her name really was and once you get into the high-end alias racket to cover your tracks as long as you have enough well-doctored passports names don’t matter as some gun-simple dame. That won’t wash either. 

This one is strictly about a girl (a woman nowadays okay) having to do what a girl had to do in a time when women had many fewer options, for good or evil. See I know the back story, I know what the post-Code Hollywood censors would not let the 1940s world know about and even Dashiell Hammett, no prude, fudged on it too. This Brigid, let’s go with that name since that is the name that she went to the big-step off under, and maybe under the seven veils that was her real name, had been in Hong Kong a high priced whore, call girl they call them now, maybe then too, at Madame Chiang’s bordello which serviced frisky British senior civil servants and wired Chinese mandarins tired of their wives with every kind of pleasure they desired. (This Madame Chiang if you know your history was the older sister of the infamous Madame Chiang kai-shek, wife of the powerful Nationalist Chinese leader of the time how else do you thing she was able to get the dough to go to Wellesley College.) The problem, always a problem with fickle men was that the good old boys either got tired of her, she faded like all things do, or both. When the Fat Man and crew came storming into Hong Kong on a lead about the fabulous jeweled bird they were seeking out of Istanbul she joined up with his crowd once she showed him and his gunsel then, Thursby, around the world. (It must have been tough going even for a seasoned pro like Brigid to deal with that Fat Man’s girth.)         

Now you can see things fall into place. Using her still powerful feminine wiles on that Fat Man crew (except Joel Cairo who being what they would have called then if they dared on screen “light on his feet,” a sissy, would be impervious to her charms) and half the guys in port like sucker bait Captain Jacoby who actually wound up getting the bird out even if he paid for it with a few slugs in the mix. (Not from her although at trial the less than chivalrous Sam Spade trying to suck up to the D.A. and get out of his own legal troubles by trying to tie her into every unsolved murder from Hong Kong to Frisco Bay.)

Brigid’s winding up at the good offices of Miles Archer and Sam Spade made perfect sense. Just some more man bait. By the way, here’s another back story tidbit, Brigid never was referred to the pair at her hotel but once she figured out her plan, as far as she could figure such things in advance, she had picked the name out of a telephone directory. Archer came up first. If somebody named Abbott say had been the first name he would have been sitting six feet under now instead of jerkwater Miles.  

              

She played the sullen, slightly soiled (quaint term for a fallen woman, yes) damsel in distress to Sam perfectly. Played him like a yo-yo once she got him in heat. Made him buy the Archer story, the Thursby story, and best of all until she saw he had his limits of use to her the Fat Man story. Would have seduced the impervious Joel Cairo someway if it had suited her purposes, lavender boy and all. A smart private detective, if there is such an animal whose main joy in life is peeping through keyholes and drinking shoddy whiskey from the bottle at the bottom of their desk drawers, would have walked away once they knew about this Thursby character, about his putting newspaper around his bed so nobody could sneak up on him. Jesus, no amount of trips around the world with the experienced Brigid working her skills was worth tangling up with these bad characters.     

The rest of the play was a piece of cake. Play him off and on against the Fat Man and if things got dicey let the Fat Man’s gunsel put a few slugs in Sam’s ear. Hell if he got rough then she might have to do the rooty-toot-toot herself. Here’s where the play fouled up and it wasn’t really her fault in the end although she would step off for the whole thing anyway. That fucking hyped-up bird, that Maltese Falcon, was a fake, the dingus was nothing, not real nothing but blacken enamel. Seeing that there was no dough from any source Sam cut bait, cut up his honey and seeing he was built to be the fall guy if he didn’t pass the blame off sent her over. This is where the faded beauty Brigid part comes in. Maybe if she had been about ten years younger, and about fifty years less of a whore she could have coaxed him into running away with her. No dice. Here’s another little back story tidbit they didn’t tell you in the movie tough guy hard-boiled detective Sam Spade after she was gone spent many a cold winter night wishing he had run away with her. Yeah, the stuff of dreams works in funny ways. Still a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do.       

Kenny Jacobs’ take:

I had better admit that I know already through conversations with Phil Larkin and what I could figure would be his take on this film given his inclinations that he would hone in on the relatively minor figure of Brigid. I agree with everybody who has reviewed this movie over the past seventy-five years that there are serious questions about whether her real name was Brigid O’Shaughnessy  but we will go with that name as good as any others and as a few commentators have noted when the Frisco coppers finally put the 

cuffs on her after Sam Spade was forced to send her over to save his own neck that was the name she gave on the police blotter. And the name she took the big step-off under. So much for what dreams are made of which had the coppers scratching their heads in bewilderment when Sam said that remark going down that long elevator run. They were always behind the curve on the case anyway, had already deposited Miles Archer’s, Thursby’ and Captain Jacobi’s deaths in the cold files and would only resurrect them when they decided to clean the slate of half a dozen cases and lay them at Brigid’s doorstep since she was already going to take the big step-off for Archer’s murder anyway. But enough of that little dimwitted gun simple mantrap because when the deal went down the one really pulling the strings was Caspar Gutman, the “Fat Man.”

Figure it out for yourself. Brigid-down for the count. The cheapjack gunsel, Wilmar, Gutman hired down in a shootout with the coppers as he was trying to take the Oakland ferry. Joel Cairo face down in Frisco bay after a night with some rough trade Jean Genet types down along the waterfront. Hell they even tried to take Sam’s ticket but his quick-witted lawyer made short work of that attempt and although it cost him a few bucks they both had a good laugh this second time the tried to pull that license crap. They never caught up to the Fat Man and who knows he might have grabbed the goddam bird after all. But mainly he got away and that says a lot about the whole caper.  

Look at it this way who else could have masterminded the whole operation. Yeah so you see it had to be the Fat Man. Here’s the back story which will surprise everybody who thought Brigid just stumbled into the low rent back alley building the Archer& Spade operation ran out of along with repo men, con artists, disbarred lawyers, unlicensed dentists and swift insurance jobbers. And don’t believe that bullshit about Brigid picking the name out of some vagrant telephone book. She, whatever her sexual charms and skills,   wasn’t bright enough for that heavy a task. Gutman had checked around with local guys he knew from the international cartel he was fronting for and Archer & Spade came out number one on the “from hunger” list. Once the Fat Man dangled Brigid in front of either man, once they got a whiff of that gardenia fragrance and dreams of silky sheets the game was on. Sending “light on his feet” Joel Cairo to back Brigid up, to make the whole thing look like a tong war, make it look like it was everybody against everybody else in the scramble for the fucking black falcon. Brilliant.           

But that was not the end of the Fat Man’s magic once it turned out Sam Spade was the one left standing once Brigid blew Archer’s brains out so the gunsel could take down Thursby when it looked like he was trying to front Brigid to cut his own deal. He has Brigid lure Sam into his spider-web, they meet and the Fat Man promises Sam the world. Sam bites, bites big time figuring with his share that he would be able to keep Brigid for himself, keep her off the street corner tricks which is where she was heading. That of course before he found out that Brigid after about fifty “heartfelt” denials had lied to him about killing Miles. And before the freaking dingus turned out to be as fake as Gutman’s idea of cutting Sam in for some serious change and he needed someone to take the fall. Hell, the Fat Man might have been carrying too many extra pounds for his own good but he moved swiftly enough when danger lurked. Not a scratch or a breeze on him. Nice work Caspar.        

*********

Phil Larkin’s rebuttal:

As Greg Green, our esteemed site manager and social media guru, mentioned above in his introduction I went kicking and screaming into this so-called dual review with the young kid Kenny Jacobs. I have never shared a review in my life, the damn idea seems like an oxymoron or something. Some silly idea like this was to be some Siskel and Ebert gab fest in cyberspace. WTF. I hope this little so-called experiment will be the last one I have to wade through. Now Kenny as I have found out in not a bad guy, writes some pretty good stuff about zombies and super-hero comic book kiddie stuff that nobody under the age of thirty will read but he is totally out of his depth in struggling to figure out what the hell is going on in a simple private detective greed and glory flic like The Maltese Falcon. I won’t belabor the point but his so-called credentials for this review, which Greg Green must have been drunk to let go by, was that he had film noir in his DNA because his parents had taken him to a million film festival retrospectives when he was a kid of about eight. As against my well-known connoisseurship of this beloved genre since my own lonesome travel youth cadging many a Saturday afternoon matinee double-feature at the old now long gone Strand Theater in the town I grew up in.               

If you have read this far then you know that Mr. Jacobs and I have very different “takes” as Greg Green is fond of calling them. What I question is whether he actually saw this movie or had, like a lot of the other younger writers here, just cribbed from a summary on Wikipedia. Or maybe he is remembering back to when his parents took him to see this film when he was eight and he got scared by the big fat guy who was giving Sam Spade a hard time because no way in God’s good green earth is Caspar Gutman, the Fat Man the person pulling the strings on this one. Hell he had trouble enough just walking across the room never mind trying to get his greedy big hand on a precious stone bird.          

The only thing I believe we agree on is that Sam Spade is just a foil, some jabbering for the real action and that somebody else was pulling the strings. Hell Brigid, dear sweet Brigid, bless her little whorish heart had this one down from scene one. Kenny claims, erroneously, probably based on information from Wikipedia that the Fat Man through his international cartel connections, mainly a bunch of guys working for an Armenian rug merchant who desperately wanted that black bird for his mistress once she had read the story in some historical novel by Sir Walter Scott about what had happened to the dingus before it ever got to Spain, had gathered the information for Brigid to run over the back alley office of Archer &Spade for some local manpower. Yes, the Fat Man fronted the dough and all for the operation I will not deny that but the real record shows, what Brigid herself told the coppers when she was trying to get out from under taking the big step-off for the murder of Miles Archer, was that she had picked their names out of the telephone book. You hardly need to pull in half the criminal world to do that soft task.        

What Kenny missed, consciously missed as far as I can see, is that Brigid’s connections with the Fat Man were tangential, she was running her own operation from the time she met the Fat Man in Madame Chiang’s brothel in Hong King and he confided his tall tale story to her. Once she saw his entourage she saw easy pickings, some flaming sissy, Cairo, as we called gay guys in the old neighborhood when we didn’t call them fags, a bent gunsel Thursby who thought so much of the Fat Man that after about two minutes in Hong Kong he sided with Brigid and another hired gun, Willmar who some crippled newspaper boy had been able to steal his guns without batting an eyelash. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight as the late New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin used to say. So all she needed to do was grab some local Frisco muscle, it didn’t matter if it was Archer or Spade or if the first name in the directory was Abbott whom she took around the world since once she got her claws in either would be putty in her hands although she claimed she would have personally favored the more handsome Archer to the “runt” Spade but the coppers dismissed that as so much bad blood once Sam stopped doing her bidding. Once he sent her over to save his own gutless neck after the bird proved to be a fake which some Greek merchant in Istanbul had fobbed off on some other guy before the Fat Man and then Brigid got their hands on it. Her big mistake and an easy one to commit once you believed the reason for covering the bird in black paint was not having it evaluated in Hong Kong before she left. (Little did she know that the “fake” had been a set-up by that Greek merchant who would eventually sell the real one to that Armenian rug merchant which did the trick to get that mistress to start doing tricks out of the Kama Sutra he kept begging her to do.)            

(As if to put paid to Kenny’s bogus take the Fat Man did not fade into the woodwork although he did get away from San Francisco easily enough once he shed Willmar to the sharks. He wound up in Amsterdam where the old Interpol grabbed him on an international warrant but would eventually let him go once San Francisco decided to clean up its cold case load and pin everything Brigid. It turned out he was related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so wound up back in England living on Baker Street somewhere.)

Kenny Jacob’s rebuttal:

I agree with my esteemed if edging toward senility fellow writer Phil Larkin that Sam Spade, hell even Miles Archer if things had turned out that way, was nothing but trimming, a fall guy, extra baggage on the real action that was happening that he was clueless about until the end. Or almost the end when he found out the dingus was a fake and that it was either he or Brigid who was going to take the fall and he, having lost in the “stuff of dreams” derby sent her over to his buddies the coppers who really wanted his hide. But Phil must have been smoking that wacky weed, that dope you can on some days smell around the office when some of the older guys having a flashback to that Summer of Love, 1967 they have been going on and on about ever since I arrived here in early 2017 decide to go to nostalgia land. (Greg is not happy about the dope during working hours but is unsure what to do about it since “precedent” from Allan Jackson’s time was the place was some opium den or something.)     

Yeah Phil most definitely is on something if he thinks that the little what does he call the women, oh yeah, the frill Brigid was running the operation to grab the black falcon. Christ I don’t even think she would know what a telephone directory was if pressed never mind actually picking some name starting with the letter “A.” And if Phil wasn’t high as a kite when he came up with the “idea” that Brigid was running the show then the only other reason she came into his head was that Phil is a notorious skirt-chaser. Has regaled me with stories from his youth thinking that I was one of his good old boys.  I have seen him in action when Josh Breslin’s old flame, Leslie Dumont, who now courtesy of Greg has a by-line something she never had with Allan as long as he had known her, is around and you can see that the stars and moon single-handedly revolve around women.       

Yeah, no way is some little whore like Brigid, even if she was once a high-priced call girl, a treat in white women-starved Hong Kong, had the dough to run such an enterprise. She was strictly bait for either Archer or Spade, whoever grabbed her first for the Fat Man      

who knew exactly who he was latching her onto from his local sources. Two, take your pick, guys from hunger, working out of some back alley building with repo men and failed dentists, as skirt crazy as Phil. (Archer licked his chops when he first saw her even though he was married and Sam was having a torrid affair with his wife right under his nose so let’s not dismiss that skirt-crazy idea out of hand Phil.

Look at the play though. Brigid down to her last few hundred, having to hock her furs when Sam needed dough, led Sam by the nose not to some operation of her own but to the Fat Man once she knew he was in town. Every action she took from leading Sam to the Fat Man to begging Sam to let her get away with Archer’s murder once the caper was heading in the wrong direction  let’s anybody, let’s everybody, private detective or not, know that she was just a cog in the wheel, a mantrap and nothing else. The final proof although Phil will probably deny it is nobody did a damn thing to spring her once Sam sent her over. Yeah, she took the big step-off alone. And like Phil said the Fat Man eventually walked. As Sam Spade had nothing to do with it-“case closed.”