There Will Be Wailing In Winchester (And Not Just Winchester, Either) “The Boy Next Door” 1950s Actor Tab Hunter Has Caught The West-bound Freight-Passes At 86

There Will Be Wailing In Winchester (And Not Just Winchester, Either) “The Boy Next Door” 1950s Actor Tab Hunter Has Caught The West-bound Freight-Passes At 86

By Si Lannon

Yes, there will be wailing and weeping to in towns like Winchester, Westchester, Westwood, West Hollywood, and West Wildwood in certain precincts where women of a certain age (maybe men too which I will explain later), came of age, started male gazing in the 1950s now that heart-throb Tab Hunter, the consummate “boy next door” (that boy next door would not be the one in the next cold water flat in some urban tenement but out in lush lawn Levitt-town, Andersonville, Peoria, Modesto where the winds of change were blowing fierce as the post-World War II generations were beginning their short, too short golden age) has caught the west-bound freight, had passed away at 86. Were weeping, as I will admit I am too but for different reasons, for their virginal lost youths when all seemed possible and now have nothing but burdens and too much time fighting their own wars against the ravages of time. Yeah, thinking back to the first time they heard Tab Hunter singing the forever version of Sonny James’ Young Love coming dreamily through the ubiquitous transistor radio attached closely to their heads to keep prying parents at arms-length. Then they saw him on television and the movies and the swooning began.         

I have my own Tab Hunter freaking boy next door story which I have to get off my chest, fifty years plus off my chest, before I can go on and pay certain respects to Mr. Hunter’s career and his “secret” life. See faraway “boy next door” guys had it easy they just had to look pretty, okay, handsome, have clean fingernails and wavy hair. Above all only stink of sex in a most indirect way to not scare off hovering mothers. Tab Hunter (and some others like Fabian and Conway Twitty) were like catnip to dream-crazy daughters-and their mothers in the 1950s. And therein lies my tale. See I was the real boy next door to a young woman, a girl really, Rosalind O’Brian (I will not get angry at anyone if that name evokes thoughts of princesses in towers awaiting rescue by errant take no prisoners knights or sweet summer nights filled with flower fragrances before the sun goes down since that was what the name evoked in my forlorn heart as well) who would not give me the time of day in sixth grade when I first started doing my own male gaze at the opposite sex. Sure, Rosalind would talk to me, talk a blue streak in class, laugh at some of my sixth-grade nervous humor but when I asked her to go to the Sacred Heart Friday night church dance which were held to keep errant real youth, young bravos, from temptations path in that silly way that priests did everything talk straight about sex, leaving us to learn what we learned on the street, half of it bullshit and dangerously wrong.

Cut to the chase. The reason she gave me for not going to the dance with me was that she had a “crush” on the real boy next door-Tab Hunter-and implied that she was saving herself for his attentions. Here is the kicker, the kick in the teeth, dear sweet Rosalind O’Brian actually went to the dance I asked her to attend with Rod Roberts, a dreamy guy who looked exactly like a boy next door, had wavy blond hair and a winsome smile. Perfidy thy name is Rosalind.             

Well I have gotten over that slight, almost, and now can pay a certain homage to Tab Hunter, especially with what he must have gone through as a female sex symbol when he was as queer as a three-dollar bill, was a closeted gay man until he came out in a memoir in 2006. Damn. Even though Hollywood was a closeted safe haven for gays and lesbians along with places like the Village in New York and North Beach in San Francisco the seals were wrapped up tight with seven seals about “homosexuality” in the community. What we out in the working- class precincts of North Adamsville called faggots and every other foul name before we found out what does it matter who you love, more importantly, that it was not the state’s or any other person’s concern who did what with who. But that was much latter.          

The irony is that we, I, had a beef with Tab Hunter when he could have given a damn about Rosalind’s saving herself for him, would have been more likely to have done his male gazing at one Rod Roberts later in life since the last I heard balding and rotund Rob had gotten married to some guy in Madison, Wisconsin. But what was a sixth-grade kid, a kid raised up in the high holy Roman Catholic religion, to know of such things. Knowing only then the admonition from dear mother to not take rides, candy, from strangers, meaning strange men, perverts lurking in every dark cover waiting to spring. Knowing only that in secret whispers there was talk in the family that one of my cousins was “different.” I have already recounted our ignorant terms for those who we called “light on their feet” and even fag-baited each other just for kicks. Jesus what we went through.     

If you had asked me back in 1957, 1960, 1965 if I would be paying homage to an openly gay man I would have said you were crazy, had a screw loose which is an expression I liked to use then or worse. But you can learn a few things in life. Learn also that fame is fleeting as happened to Tab Hunter once the boy next door lost its appeal to young women. Learned that guys with talent and it is obvious that Tab Hunter has it could have a second career ignited by playing opposite the eternally great Divine in John Water’s Polyester. Could “come out” eventually. Yes, there will be wailing and weeping now that Tab Hunter has caught the west-bound freight. Including a tear here. RIP, Tab Hunter, RIP.      

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics' "Our Day Will Come" In Mind

Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics' "Our Day Will Come" In Mind

By Sam Lowell

This is the second installment (the first dated January 13, 2018) set as an introduction to the history of the American Left History blog. I am, as pointed out before one of the few people, more importantly one of the few writers, who has taken part in almost all of the key junctures in this forty something year attempt to address the unwritten history of the poor and oppressed in America and the world. That includes the latest flare-up which has brought about a new regime, partially with my help, so I am well-placed to tell the tale. As part of the “truce” arranged with current site manager Greg Green I will tell the story and will elicit comments from a couple of other Editorial Board members. The first installment dealt with the genesis of this blog with predecessors going back to the late 1960s when a number of the older writers still standing came on board, many through long friendships with the previous site manager going back to high school days, including myself.  Today I will deal with the old hard copy version of ALH and the transfer due to economic necessary of going on-line at the beginning of the century.           

**********

With the seed money we were able to gather after the sale of Progressive Nation we put together the hard copy version of ALH. We, as well, got a big financial boost from our old high school friend and great running back for the North Adamsville Red Raiders, Jack Callahan,  who now is Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and has sold a million cars based on his charming ways (and that of Mrs. Toyota, Chrissie McNamara, his forever high school sweetheart whom he is still married too unlike the rest of us who have at least two marriages per person, a ton of kids, and two tons of college tuitions which are still being paid for or only recently extinguished).  Our idea, really Allan’s idea, no again, really way back when Markin’s idea was to do in a journalistic way what Boston University professor the late Howard Zinn did with his book The People’s History of the United States which is to say look under the rocks, the crevices, the off-beat places in the American experience. Tell the story that doesn’t make the mainstream media, or didn’t for a long time certainly in the time of Reagan’s time in the 1980s when everybody but us it seemed was keeping his or her head down.

So in a funny way we were running against the stream, having only a small steady dedicated readership and writing staff made up of guys I have already mentioned and who readers will know including Josh Brelin from up in Maine who we treated like one of our own. That last statement is important because what happened (and might be the real genesis of what brought about Allan’s downfall) was that for financial reasons, emotional reasons, and a certain tendency on the part of all those involved to get wrapped up in a nostalgia trip back the halcyon days of the 1960s when you couldn’t walk a block in most cities and college towns without running into fellow kindred spirits, some cause bringing people to the streets, and a feeling that the new breeze that Markin had talked endlessly about from high school days on was going to happen almost by default. We were going to turn the world upside down and for keeps.

Obviously at the height of the Reagan era (1980-1992 throwing the first Bush, number 41 in the succession, into the mix) and beyond for a while that was a very tough dollar to pull off as the years going by would develop a divide between the old-time “hippie” base and the generation turning into two generations who were off in a different direction, could as I mentioned in the recent internal wrangling “give a f- - k” about the 1960s except maybe the dope and cool fashions now somewhat revived in a retro movement. For years though Allan and the rest of us were in a running battle over where to go and still deal with our basic mission which is still on the masthead of this blog. Allan would wax and wane with that deep tendency to drift back to the 1960s and cover stuff like all the folk movement stuff when the folk minute (almost literally) was in bloom.

Against a reality, against the real world where except Bob Dylan, and even that would be suspect, nobody knew any of the folk singers and the spirit that drove Allan and me as well, probably everybody but Si Lannon who to this day cringes whenever anybody mentions a guy like faded folksinger Erick Saint Jean whom we thought would be the next Dylan. Spent much cyber-ink of stuff like film noir which was all the rage in college town 1960s film festival retrospectives, Bogie, Robert Mitchum, the French “New Wave.” And deeply into reviewing and commenting on books and the politics of the times which had clearly faded into the dust and that even our older readership got tired of hearing about since they had drifted out of politics seeing the whole thing as a “bummer” to use a 1960s-etched expression or had drifted rightward to the party of the possible-the Democrats. They definitely did not want to hear about the finer points of the Russian Revolution, the Stalin-Trotsky fist fight, or the food fight among American radicals toward the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.                

Every once in a while we would change course a bit, would get more into contemporary politics, move onto the newer versions on the musical scene, review more current books and films but there was something missing. Something that the younger writers in the recent dispute hollered about endlessly when asked to write about the 1960s 24/7/365 when Allan finally went off the deep end for good in the summer of 2017. Having to endlessly write about the Summer of Love, 1967 which set up the explosion that brought everything to a head. Having to write about stuff they were clueless about which is what we were feeling when we confronted the changes in the 1990s. Even then Allan would try an end around and force everybody like he did last year with Alden Riley to write stuff as “punishment” for not knowing every single piece of arcana from the 1960s even if was about, oh I don’t know, plastic surgery, something weird like that.

As you could expect off of this lack of focus drained individual writers, we lost Sal Rizzo, Danny Shea, Henry Sullivan to the ennui, to hubris and lack of candor. Lost a lot of money too, a lot of Jack Callahan’s dough although he was always too much of a good guy to complain (and would tell us “I will just sell more Toyotas”). So we had to when we saw an opportunity to keep going with an on-line publication we did. That would cut expenses dramatically (and Jack would say I don’t have to carry such a large car inventory now) not needing a large office, paper costs and such. We also, or rather Allan came to a big decision which we rubber-stamped, a very big decision once we did transfer to an all on-line operation-bringing in new blood, bringing in younger writers with the original idea to get a more current take on the American political, cultural, social experience. It was a tricky proposition since the older core, including me and Allan, were worried that bringing in more professionally trained writers which is the norm these days since nobody can get anywhere without some kind of Iowa Writers Workshop pedigree would run circles around us. They, I, could not see then that this was necessary, In the end we, Allan, squandered that talent by the straight-jacket maneuvers mentioned earlier driving them to write second-rate stuff just to fill space and fill Allan’s ego when crunch time came.

I was going to finish up this second installment by discussing our first new writer, the now long gone, Jesse Perrier, yes, that Jesse Perrier, who went on to write that slew of crime novels that you see in every airport kiosk, but I will wait and introduce him in the third installment when I discuss the first few years of ALH on-line. More later.     

       

A YouTube film clip of Ruby & The Romantics performing the classic, Our Day Will Come. 

Our day will come
And we'll have everything.
We'll share the joy
Falling in love can bring.

No one can tell me
That I'm too young to know (young to know)
I love you so (love you so)
And you love me.

Our day will come
If we just wait a while.
No tears for us -
Think love and wear a smile.

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come.
(Our day will come; our day will come.)

[Break]

Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way.
Our day will come.
Our day will come.

 
As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlapped in a six volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, all agreed including eventually the parents who saw the whole thing was harmful after a bout with the “devil’s music” nonsense we kids had to put up with), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (a good question, right, which I spent three marriages with all the trimming trying to figure out ,unsuccessfully). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.

As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy’s heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.

And reviewing the material in that volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this CD set, and this approach drove the reviews of all six of these volumes in the series. I won’t even go into such novelty silly songs as the title self-explanatory My Boy Lollipop by Barbie Gaye; the teen angst hidden behind the lyrics to Bobby's Girl by Marcie Blane; or, the dreamy, wistful blandness of A Thousand Stars by Kathy Young & The Innocents that would have set any self-respecting boy’s, or girl’s, teeth on edge. And prayed, prayed out loud and to heaven that the batteries in that transcendent transistor would burn to hell before having to continue sustained listening to such, well, such… and I will leave it at that. I will rather concentrate on serious stuff like the admittedly great harmonics on Our Day Will Come by Ruby & The Romantics that I actually, secretly, liked but I had no one to relate it to, no our to worry about that day, or any day, or Tonight You Belong To Me by Patience & Prudence that I didn’t like secretly or openly but gave me that same teen angst feeling of having no one, no girl one, belonging to, me.

And while today it might be regarded as something of a pre-feminist feminist anthem for younger women, You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore, was meaningless for a guy who didn’t have girl to own, or not own, to fret over her independent streak, or not. Moreover, since I was never, at least I never heard otherwise, that I was some damsel in distress’ pining away boy next store The Boy Next Door by The Secrets was wrapped with seven seals. And while I had many a silent, lonely, midnight waiting by the phone night how could Cry Baby by The Bonnie Sisters, Lonely Blue Nights by Rosie & The Originals, and Lonely Nights by The Hearts give me comfort when even Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry hard-rockin’ the night away could not console me, and take away that blue heart I carried like a badge, a badge of almost monastic honor. Almost.

So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Yah, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.

And from girls even.

When The Wild Boys Roamed The 1950s Rockabilly Night-With Sunnydale Records In Mind.

When The Wild Boys Roamed The 1950s Rockabilly Night-With Sunnydale Records In Mind.

CD Review

By Zack James

Sunnydale Records-The Early Days, various artists well-known and one hit wonders, Rem Records, 1991

[This compilation of mainly rockabilly records from Sunnydale Records, a small label working out of a recording studio in Vicksburg, Mississippi run by the local legend Sam McGee was hatched initially from and interview the rock music critic Seth Garth had with Sam. Seth, doing double duty as a rock historian here prodded Sam to let him listen to some of his material. And the rest is history. He contacted Artie Samuels of Rem Records to see if they would re-release the material after working laboriously through Sam’s tapes and reels. These twenty-two recordings are the result. If you want to know what it was like when men, and it was mainly men then, played rockabilly for keeps listen up.]        

“You know the guys who came in here when I first opened my doors were the wild boys, the guys who were on the edge, the guys who wanted any way possible not be whatever fate had predicted would be in store for them. Maybe some of them were desperate too, at least some of them must have been desperate enough to fork down two dollars to record something, a lot of them couldn’t even carry a tune,” said Sam McGee to Seth Garth who was interviewing him for a history of rock and roll in the early days article that he was doing for Classic Rock magazine.

Right then Seth was looking for background information about all the guys who were not Elvis or Carl or Chuck or Jerry Lee and how they had fallen by the wayside in the fight for who would be king of the hill in the early days of rock when it was a jailbreak sound for a whole half generation of youth from East to West and back born during or just after the carnage of World War II which acted as a backdrop to what they were fighting a clandestine battle against. He had been tipped off about Sam McGee and his encyclical knowledge about and as a participant in the old days by Rodney Pease, a one-hit wonder back then with Shake My Tree which was originally recorded, demo recorded at Sunnyvale Records. He had met Rodney still at it at the Blue Note just off of Beale Street in Memphis, that town the natural spot to start looking of the roots of rockabilly which is what he needed more information on since he already had plenty of stuff on the blues, stuff associated with an off-shoot of the folk music minute of the 1960s. Rodney was doing rockabilly covers to the aging clientele who remembered when he kicked out the jams and made everybody dance when they were all kids.

Rodney had told Seth that he could find Sam at an assisted-living facility just outside of Vicksburg where it had all started for him, for Sam too. When he visited the facility, which he would do over a few sessions, he found a sprightly old man, filled with long white hair and a wispy old beard but still able to talk a mile a minute. Once Seth made his mission clear Sam was like a cannonball ready to explode. As background he told Seth that he had started out selling records and musical instruments out of what was then the Sunnydale Record Shop just after the war when he had come home from the European wars and decided that he would, having survived a few big battles, pursue his dream of working in the entertainment industry. That was when he got the bug, the idea of setting up a recording studio in the empty space in the back of the store after he had read too many stories about how Hank this and Jimmy that who had made it had started out via making a demo at this or that small recording studio.

Sam wanted in, wanted in bad, had half-dreamed that he could find the next gem, the next Hank, and later the next Elvis from the crowd who came through the Sunnydale doors. So from 1947 until he closed the shop and recording studio in 1961 to concentrate on his night club (which had only closed in 2000) after he realized that the big rockabilly minute that he had depended on, dreamed about had been eclipsed by other more sedate rock music Sam dreamed his big outlandish dreams (“outlandish” Sam’s expression).     

Sam had made Seth laugh at that “wild boys who couldn’t sing or play an instrument” since early on in his life, back in high school when he was a wild boy himself and hung around with such he decided that since he couldn’t do either, sing or play, he would become a music critic, at least until he won his spurs as a journalist although he never got to be that big time generic journalist that he had dreamed of becoming. Hence this next in an endless series of musical history assignments.         

Sam continued, “You know as many guys as came through Sunnyvale and there were plenty we only had that one big hit by Rodney Pease, and that was a fluke since there was a guy from RCA in that day looking for the next Elvis to add to their stable. All those other guys were getting waxed up for that record they could show their grandchildren I guess when they had them on their knees and they asked what rock and roll was down in the hills and hollows before it got sprung on the whole world, a whole generation which lost it inhibitions, or some of them listening and dancing to some primordial beat that they didn’t understand but made them jump.”

“But it was hard to stop them, hard to stop those hungry boys, or would have been if I had tried since Sam Phillip up at Sun in Memphis had his big breakthrough with Elvis although even he didn’t get the riches he deserved when he sold Elvis’ contract to RCA for what turned out to be cheap money. Frankly I needed the money myself so I wasn’t telling any guy and the few gals who came in not to fork down that two bucks. I was running a nightclub over on the Southside of Vicksburg, the Starlight Lounge and was running behind on all my payments until Sid Lawrence saved my ass when people were willing to pay to hear him in person but would not buy his records. Maybe it was his stage presence that didn’t get translated onto the vinyl. He could pack them in though God rest his wicked drunken, drugged up died at an early age soul. Here people were willing to fork up three dollars for a cover charge, drink an ocean of liquor, high shelf stuff too and would not fork out a buck for a silly 45 RPM which would have pushed him toward the big time. I am still trying to figure that one out.”    

Seth then asked Sam how the guys who came in (we will assume that the few girls who came had the same basic bug) found out about his Sunnyvale recording studio way down in Vicksburg and what was driving them to do so. Sam replied, “Well you know after the war, after World War II since we have had a few more since then, the young guys who missed the war, missed the action, good or bad, were restless, couldn’t be kept down on the farm. I mean that almost literally since the overwhelming majority of them coming through the door in those days were farm boys influenced by first I think Hank Williams who after all had that same kind of poor boy, good old boy upbringing as they had and maybe if Hank hadn’t gotten busted up with drink, drugs, some sullen women, and all that they would have followed his trail, maybe there would have been no rockabilly and no rock and roll either, the white good old boy part anyway. But Hank passed on early and there was still that restlessness.”

“Maybe part of it was the rockabilly music they heard on the radio, although that was not what it was called  back then just country like I said. What I know is this, these guys would all come in with their guitars, if they had any instrument at all, some of them in pretty good condition too, probably those pretty good guys did their ten thousand hours and had it down. Funny I was a jazz man back before the war, loved Benny and Artie Shaw, Chu Berry, and that music depended on horns and piano, even popular music too, show tunes, the guitar was from the back forty black folk (we called them n-----rs back then some still do in small clots drinking or in their exclusive country clubs) so there was a shift going on away from those more expensive instruments. Hell, you could get a guitar of some quality from the Sear catalogue for about five bucks along with your father’s tiller and your mother’s washing machine.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate the influence of Les Paul since a lot of guys, good or bad, had some of his licks, had picked them up either from a guitar book also purchased via Sears or had watched his television show if they had a television where they could see what he was doing while they couldn’t on his old radio show but I could tell when a guy had certain licks that he had been paying attention. Funny a lot of guys when I asked them said they were self-taught and probably many of them were but those guys didn’t go anywhere except back to the farm.”

“That might have been all of it though, that desperate idea of getting off the fucking farm. I know I slipped the noose myself and I couldn’t sing a note and was murder on any instrument I tried to play, and believe me I tried. I did have a good ear for music though, and a desire to do something in the entertainment field and so there you have it .Yeah, they didn’t want to plow fields like their fathers and older brothers, they wanted what I called at the time “kicks,” something different. So that is what I think drove the thing, that and ego, maybe before Elvis for a girlfriend or to play at some county fair how the hell do I know. All I know is that I always, long before Elvis, had plenty of two dollars being forked down. Almost had Frankie Lavin who made it big with Ducca Records a few years later come in because he was from Leverett the next town over from Vicksburg but I couldn’t get the production values up, that heavy bass beat that Frankie loved behind him enough on my two bit machinery back then, basically a reel to reel tape recorder and a couple of other sound instruments put together with baling wire and spit. Otherwise you would be addressing me not just as a rock and roll man from back in the day but as a man with the words of wisdom of an elder statesman from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”     

Seth had heard many stories of the deep separation between the races down South, down in the Mister James Crow South as Sam would call it and since Sam had brought up the point about the guitar being a simple-minded black instrument he decided to ask the “race question,” the race musical question that like everything else in America turned the dime on what was what back then, now too as Sam would gently put out when answering. Seth had prior knowledge from Allan Battles, the folk archivist who had interviewed Sam back in the early 1970s for a country blues article he was writing, that Sam had taken two dollars from good old boy white farm boys but also from black farm boys as well. Had had a shot at signing Chan Larson before he left the South and grabbed a lot of attention when he went to Chicago and lit up the electrified blues night at Chess Record.

“Yeah, I booked black guys in my place since you found out that information from Battles who was looking at something else, was trying to find guys, black guys who had performed in the 1920s, 1930s well before my time, in the time when RCA, the record company that made a ton of money off of Elvis later remember what I said earlier. They had sent out actual agents, guys, to comb the foothills, put posters up looking for what Battles called guys who did “roots music.” Really what he was looking for was “juke music,” the music of the Saturday night no electricity cabin, illegal liquor one guy picks up a guitar and plays until the early hours. And there was cussing, fighting, cutting guys up along the way, usually over some woman, some two-timing woman, just like with white guys hanging around their bars. I couldn’t help him directly since that really was before my time but I told him to go over to the Delta, over Clarksville way, over around Highway 61 and if anybody was still around that is where they would be, around the plantations, and small factories. Battles did find Tommy Jackson there, and through him whoever was left standing. He did write me to tell me I was in his article, later made into a book he said.”            

“As far as the black thing, you know the n----r thing back then sure I took money from anybody who wanted to have a record pressed-pay two dollars please on the fist. Now I ain’t very proud of this but this is the truth about my situation. I had to record the black guys in a separate studio once the white guys found out that I recorded black guys in “their” studio, otherwise I would have been lynched myself probably. Here is the way it worked though, the white guys said the great unwashed black guys stunk up the place and why did I let them in anyway. I also had to record the black guys under the Sunset label as “race records” otherwise some redneck would have come in and waylaid the place. That’s all I have to say on the matter, and no more but if you check the label, the Sunset label, you will find a guy like Bukka White there under the name Jimmy Stewart and later Ike Turner, under the name Johnny John. That was before he broke out with that classic Rocket 88 of his.”    

Seth having gotten all he was going to get from Sam on the race question shifted gears and was looking for anything Sam remembered about any of the guys who came in, what they played, who they covered, anything funny as well. 

“You know, or maybe you don’t, although you look old enough but the automobile was the king crazy thing that guys wanted, young guys, white farm boys, black turpentine factory boys, so a lot of it was about getting a big car and maybe a fancy suit, a few bucks to impress some current girlfriend or something to make an impression on some honey they were eyeing. No way that they were going to get that on the farm or factory so they took a chance, a two dollar chance to see if they had “it,” see if they were going to be the next Elvis or Bill Haley, Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters. Keep that in mind, okay. Remember too that these were country boys, both races and as you well know those few guys who did “win,” the one hit wonders, the guys who made a few bucks on the red barn Saturday night or chittling circuit didn’t know squat about money, got taken advantage of by record companies, night club owners and radio stations who pieced them off with chump change, that big old Cadillac that they were craving and not much else. I wanted you to know that, know too that I cut a few corners with guys, not so much in the recording end as at that nightclub that burned money to keep up.”

“The very first guy who came in, Hal Wallace, from Glover, on the other side of Vicksburg, came in after a cousin who read an ad I put in the Gazette offering to record anybody who wanted to be recorded for that two dollars. Here’s a real good example of what I was just talking about. The guy could play the guitar like crazy, had a fair singing voice but would get the words to the lyrics all scrambled up. I offered him a sheet of music with lyrics that he was trying to play, I had a sideline of selling sheet music in those days as well as selling records. Get this, he said he “never had not learnin,’” had never learned to read so he was much obliged but he would have to sing what he knew. Jesus”

“After that I stopped wondering what would make a guy think he could make a living out of anything having to do with music. Just kept the doors open and let what would happen happen. One guy, Jimmy Joe something came in wanting to do an instrumental since he was shy about singing. Only problem was that the guitar he brought in wasn’t “store bought” is the way he put it but had been handed down to him by some relative and so only had five strings, was missing  an E string and so he never could catch the high chords. Now you get what was going on down at the bottom, down where the dreams were a lot bigger than the talent. One poor boy black brother didn’t even have a guitar but asked me if I could lend him a hammer so he could nail a couple of nails in the wall and put up a string, one string, strangely enough he could play the hell out of that thing but its didn’t come through on the recording, although with today’s technology he probably would have sounded like he had an orchestra behind him.”

[Seth silently laughed to himself since he had a bug about over-produced songs, which the record companies, producers, hell, even the singers who were probably hard-pressed to realize that was them singing got pissed off about and would complain loudly to whatever publication he was writing for at the time.] 

“I can’t tell you how many guys came in to sing somebody else’s song, one string of guys ran around Warren Smith’s Rock and Roll Ruby which was a great song, a classic but how many guys were going to succeed doing that single cover. Another string had Sonny Burgess’ Red-Headed Woman as its hook. I had to laugh every time some trend got big and you could tell all these good old boys were smiling and scheming thinking they had as much talent as whoever it was they were trailing.”    

“I’d like to have a dollar though for all the near misses I had, all the money I spent promoting some record I thought had something to it, but see I just never had enough money to do it right, even with the guys who I knew could have created a niche for themselves. Can’t tell you how much I spent in postage alone sending first class parcels to anywhere from fifty to one hundred radio stations within two hundred miles of Vicksburg as the crow flies to get a nibble, a few got taken for local consumption by no big hits except Rodney’s and like I say that was a fluke but I liked my cut, no question on that one. Even back in 1954, maybe 1955 sent the big rock DJ Allan Freedman about a dozen records at different times when I heard an interview that he was interested in rockabilly as well and rhythm and blues as the roots of rock music. Never heard back though.”      

“Either that would happen, no deal for my guy, or I would have a group come in, four or five guys with instruments and I just couldn’t put it together with my little space. That’s how I lost the Del-tones who did the big hit My Darlin’ Rock and Roll Susie and a bunch of others. So Seth when you write this article up, or the book when you get done with it, just remember old Sam McGee was in the thick of things when rock and roll and rhythm and blues rode the night waves. Say Sam almost made it, okay.”