Before “The Last Picture Show” Was The “Last Picture Show” With The Larry McMurtry Book In Mind

Before “The Last Picture Show” Was The “Last Picture Show” With The Larry McMurtry  Book In Mind

Book Review

By Jack Callahan

The Last Picture Show, by Larry Mc Murtry,  

It is time to rally around the troops. Time for me to put my two cents worth in defending my old-time friends who write for this blog (and the on-line editions of American Folk Gazette, American Film Gazette and Progressive Nation among others). Time to honor one old pal, Phil Larkin, known in the old days as Foul-mouth Phil who others have written about in this space and mainly have gotten right about the origin of the name. About the weird twist too of how the girls, including my wife of over forty years Chrissie McNamara, even good go to church, Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, every Sunday and who had rosary beads always present in their hands and a Bible between their knees like her, secretly liked his constant swearing so that he among us all never lacked for dates, at least one date anyway with them. But that is not why I am honoring Phil today since I have much more important business to attend to before I get to a short review of this excellent book by Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, which I saw as a movie (with Chrissie) long before I first read his book (and a number of other related one about the fictional town of Thalia back in the 1950s) which Seth Garth, a longtime writer for this blog mentioned to me has come out recently in a trilogy according to what he had read in the New York Review of Books).

That other fish to fry deals with Phil’s portentous statements which were taken by most of the older staff here, including me, as the usual rantings of Phil when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants, what he considers his due. This time it is centered on a number of statements which he has made as part of his film reviews about the older writers who had been close to the previous site manager being purged, a word at least one of the younger writers has used freely in his reviews so he, they, those now victorious younger writers, must be feeling the wind in their sails. I will not mention his name since the current site manager Greg Green well known for red-penciling, not blue like most editors, copy has “warned” people off doing so under the pretext that “we have to move on” from that pernicious influence) backed up by the newly installed Editorial Board ( a board handpicked by Green and loaded, overloaded, with younger writers who supported him in the internal struggle against that previous site manager and who are really nothing but toadies and rubber-stampers for him).  

Readers familiar with this site, and perhaps with the internal dispute which wound up with the departure and “exile” of that previous manager, know that I have been neither a leading contributor to the writings posted here although I have been the subject of many reminiscences by the older writers including the old gang famous, maybe infamous, one since more than one old fogy has gotten parts wrong, of how Chrissie and I met, nor very vocal in the fight between the younger and older writers which led to that previous manager’s “purge.” (Like I said previously I best put any possible controversial words in quotes to avoid that sweeping Green red pencil despite all the claptrap about the new regime being more democratic, more open to broadening the scope of what is being written about and by whom than previously.) The reason I grabbed this book assignment was that the older writers believed that I would be the only one who had “not burned his bridges” to the new regime which is the way one wag put the matter and could expect to get my piece posted.

Moreover they believed that it would “grease the rails” (I forgot who said that) if I as a big financial backer of the enterprise did the talking about what appears to be coming down the road for the older writers, and who knows maybe some younger recalcitrant writers too (remember the fraught with danger “p” word). That financial backing based on my very successful business as a Toyota car dealer, Mr. Toyota in Eastern Massachusetts with Chrissie as Ms. Toyota so I do not depend on paychecks and fears of lack of paychecks like the others who moreover are closing in on retirement. They don’t want to wind up following the example of the previous manager who with one exception, one important exception, Sam Lowell, who is the only one from the old gang who was placed on that suddenly emergent “democratic” Ed Board, supported him. Don’t want to wind up as the rumors have it hustling newspapers out in Utah for the Mormons with no retirement pension income (I don’t know about his Social Security status), no health plan (if he didn’t have adequate S.S. quarters), and no source for getting steady postings against the dark and wild savage nights going forward (not my expression but one of the older guy’s). I have committed to rallying around the troops and this is the first shot. But enough of this for now.        

*********

As I mentioned in my defense declaration above my first connection with Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show was viewing the film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich starring Jeff Bridges as Duane  the roughneck’s roughneck, Timothy Bottoms as the gentile roughneck, as Sonny, and Cybil Shepard as the alluring and sexually predatory poor little oil money boomtown rich girl Jacy who has Duane and all the boys in heat, especially Duane and in his dreams Sonny. I should also mentioned that I saw this one the first time at the Hingham, Massachusetts, Plaza Theater when it first opened (a nice counter-position to the “last” in the film title) with Chrissie. That was when we were first living together before we got did get married a couple of years later and well after she had abandoned those rosary bead hands and squeezed Bible knees. Needless to say coming up as an urban, maybe better, suburban roughneck from a hard-struck declining North Adamsville a town like Thalia, with a ton of roughneck friends some of who turned out okay and have written for a long time in places like this blog (although for how much longer is anybody’s guess) and some who didn’t fare so well the film struck a deep chord, “spoke” to me. Spoke to me as well since sports, football in particular, was a subtext for the friendship between Duane and Sonny just like it had been for me and guys like Phil Larkin. (I had been a star football player who led the Blue Warriors to two division state high school Super Bowls which had a lot to do with how Chrissie and I met initially although not how we have stayed together pretty happily for so long.)          

One thing that Seth Garth, a serious writer and a man who has written many well-received articles in this space, who was perhaps my closest friend in high school after we had a fight over Chrissie’s affections and reconciled, has always mentioned to me when writing about films based on novels is how closely they adhere to the storyline of the book. I remember once when we were having a couple of drinks at the old watering hole The Sagamore Grille in Hingham in the days when he could drink unlike now when he has sworn off the stuff we got to talking about fidelity to the book of certain films. This was when I was first interested in writing some reviews for posting here when the previous site manager was more than happy to have an old friend (and serious financial contributor I know helped as well) write up a little something. Seth mentioned that he was appalled when a film screenplay, script, was nothing like the plotline of the book and seemingly the only reason for keeping the title and author’s name was to draw the crowds in based on that cache.        

Seth always would bring up two classic cases both by Ernest Hemingway. One, To Have And Have Not, where in the book the Captain Harry Morgan is a rogue, has-been sea captain running crap to Cuba for the highest bidder with a wife who had seen better days and a parcel of kids. Against the film version where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sizzle up the screen with what Seth called some of the sexiest hottest scenes of two people with their clothes on he had ever seen while doing yeoman’s service to the French Resistance in the Caribbean during World War II. The other The Killers, a short story which starts and ends with two professional killers acting as hitmen for somebody who wanted an ex-pug out of the way and leaving the narrator wondering why he did not put up any resistance. Against the film starring Burt Lancaster as the ex-pug and fall guy and Ava Gardner as a femme fatale who has him going through the hoops for her as the reason that he went gentle into that good night. A dame in short like has happened to a million other guys except this time old Burt paid with his life for shacking up with her.

In Last Picture Show the film there is no such problem since the film adheres in the basic plotline and better in the spirit of two young roughneck Texas boys coming of age in the early 1950s. I first read the book in the 1990s I think when I was on a Larry McMurtry tear after viewing Texasville which is about this same grouping and town about twenty years later once they have gotten over their teenage angst and alienation. I was struck then as now by how closely the key episodes match up. The only added statement I would make at this time is that the book draws many more explicit sexual scenes, more graphically written than the shyer film does including references to homosexually, male and female orgasms, the sexual frustration aspect of the teen angst and alienation component, and the problems as well as good points of growing up in a small if declining town out in what was then considered the Texas countryside.  Finally, I have changed my opinion as I told Seth one of those nights when we were having those few permitted whiskeys at the Sagamore Grille I think everybody should read the classic book first and then the classic film. Now I wish I had done so.   

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Balducci’s Pizza Parlor Bet –With Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Balducci’s Pizza Parlor Bet –With Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula In Mind

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

Well, be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love

Well, she's the girl in the red blue jeans
She's the queen of all the teens
She's the one that I know
She's the one that loves me so

Say be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love

Well, she's the one that gots that beat
She's the one with the flyin' feet
She's the one that walks around the store
She's the one that gets more more more

Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love

You all know Frankie, right? Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, map of Ireland, fierce Frankie when necessary, and usually kind Frankie by rough inclination. Yah, Frankie from the old North Adamsville neighborhood. Frankie to the tenement, the cold-water flat tenement, born. Frankie, no moola, no two coins to rub together except by wit or chicanery, poor as a church mouse if there ever was such a thing, a poor church mouse that is. Yes, that Frankie. And, as well, this writer, his faithful scribe chronicling his tales, his regal tales. Said scribe to the public housing flats, hot-water flats, but still flats, born. And poorer even than any old Frankie church mouse. More importantly though, more importantly for this story that I am about to tell you than our respective social class positions, is that Frankie is king, the 1960s king hell king of Balducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs,” if not then North Quincy’s finest pizza parlor still the place where we spent many a misbegotten hour, and truth to tell, just plain killed some time when we were down at our heels, or maybe down to our heels.

Sure you know about old Frankie’s royal heritage too. I clued you in before when I wrote about my lost in the struggle for power as I tried to overthrow the king when we entered North Quincy High in 1960. By wit, chicanery, guile, bribes, threats, physical and mental, and every other form of madness he clawed his way to power after I forgot the first rule of trying to overthrow a king- you have to make sure he is dead. But mainly it was his "style”, he mad-hatter “beat” style, wherefore he attempted to learn, and to impress the girls (and maybe a few guys too), with his arcane knowledge of every oddball fact that anyone would listen to for two minutes. After my defeat we went back and forth about it, he said, reflecting his peculiar twist on his Augustinian-formed Roman Catholicism, it was his god-given right to be king of this particular earthy kingdom but foolish me I tried to justify his reign based on that old power theory (and discredited as least since the 17th century) of the divine right of kings. But enough of theory. Here’s why, when the deal went down, Frankie was king, warts and all.

All this talk about Frankie royal lineage kind of had me remembering a story, a Frankie pizza parlor story. Remind me to tell you about it sometime, about how we used to bet on pizza dough flying. What the heck I have a few minutes I think I will tell you now because it will also be a prime example, maybe better than the one I was originally thinking about, of Frankie’s treacheries that I mentioned before. Now that I think about it again my own temperature is starting to rise. If I see that bastard again I’m going to... Well, let me just tell the story and maybe your sympathetic temperature will rise a bit too.

One summer night, yeah, it must have been a summer night because this was the time of year when we had plenty of time on our hands to get a little off-handedly off-hand. In any case it would have had to be between our junior and senior years at old North Quincy High because we were talking a lot in those days about what we were going to do, or not do, after high school. And it would have had to have been on a Monday or Tuesday summer night at that and we were deflated from a hard weekend of this and that, mainly, Frankie trying to keep the lid on his relationship with his ever lovin’ sweetie, Joanne. Although come to think of it that was a full-time occupation and it could have been any of a hundred nights, summer nights or not. I was also trying to keep a lid on my new sweetie, Lucinda, a sweetie who seemed to be drifting away, or at least in and out on me, mostly out, and mostly because of my legendary no dough status (that and no car, no sweet ride down the boulevard, the beach boulevard so she could impress HER friends, yah it was that kind of relationship). Anyway it's a summer night when we had time on our hands, idle time, devil’s time according to mothers’ wit, if you want to know the truth, because his lordship (although I never actually called him that), Frankie I, out of the blue made me the following proposition. Bet: how high will Tonio flip his pizza dough on his next pass through.

Now this Tonio, as you know already if you have read the story about how Frankie became king of the pizza parlor, and if you don’t you will hear more about him later, was nothing but an ace, numero uno, primo pizza flinger. Here’s a little outline of the contours of his art, although minus the tenderness, the care, the genetic dispositions, and who knows, the secret song or incantation that Tonio brought to the process. I don’t know much about the backroom work, the work of putting all the ingredients together to make the dough, letting the dough sit and rise and then cutting it up into pizza-size portions. I only really know the front of the store part- the part where he takes that cut dough portion in front of him in the preparation area and does his magic. That part started with a gentle sprinkling of flour to take out some of the stickiness of the dough, then a rough and tumble kneading of the dough to take any kinks out, and while taking the kinks out the dough gets flattened, flattened enough to start taking average citizen-recognizable shape as a pizza pie. Sometimes, especially if Frankie put in an order, old Tonio would knead that dough to kingdom come. Now I am no culinary expert, and I wasn’t then, no way, but part of the magic of a good pizza is to knead that dough to kingdom come so if you see some geek doing a perfunctory couple of wimpy knead chops then move on, unless you are desperate or just ravenously hungry.

Beyond the extra knead though the key to the pizza is the thinness of the crust and hence the pizza tosses. And this is where Tonio was a Leonardo-like artist, no, that’s not right, this is where he went into some world, some place we would never know. I can still see, and if you happened to be from old North Quincy, you probably can still see it too if you patronized the place or stood, waiting for that never-coming Eastern Mass. bus, in front of the big, double-plate glass pizza parlor windows watching in amazement while Tonio tossed that dough about a million times in the air. Artistry, pure and simple.

So you can see now, if you didn’t quite get it before that Frankie’s proposition was nothing but an old gag kind of bet, a bet on where Tonio would throw, high or low. Hey, it’s just a variation on a sports bet, like in football, make the first down or not, pass or rush, and so on, except its pizza tosses, okay. Of course, unlike sports, at least known sports, there are no standards in place so we have to set some rules, naturally. Since it was Frankie’s proposition he got to give the rules a go, and I could veto.

Frankie, though, and sometimes he could do things simply, although that was not his natural inclination; his natural inclination was to be arcane in all things, and not just with girls. Simply Frankie said in his Solomonic manner that passed for wisdom, above or below the sign in back of Tonio’s preparation area, the sign that told the types of pizza sold, their sizes, their cost and what else was offered for those who didn’t want pizza that night.

You know such signs, every pizza palace has them, and other fast eat places too. You have to go to “uptown” eateries for a tabled menu in front of your eyes, and only your eyes, but here’s Tonio’s public offerings. On one side of the sign plain, ordinary, vanilla, no frills pizza, cheap, maybe four or five dollars for a large, small something less, although don’t hold me to the prices fifty years later for chrissakes, no fixings. Just right for “family night,” our family night later, growing up later, earlier in hot-water flats, public housing hot-water flats time, we had just enough money for Spam, not Internet spam, spam meat although that may be an oxymoron and had no father hard-worked cold cash for exotic things like pizza, not a whole one anyway, in our household. And from what Frankie told me his too.

Later , when we had a little more money and could “splurge” for an occasional take-out, no home delivery in those days, when Ma didn’t feel like cooking, or it was too hot, or something and to avoid civil wars, the bloody brother against brother kind, plain, ordinary vanilla pizza was like manna from heaven for mama, although nobody really wanted it and you just felt bloated after eating your share (and maybe the crust from someone who doesn’t like crust, or maybe you traded for it); or, plain, by the slice, out of the oven (or more likely oven-re-heated after open air sitting on some aluminum special pizza plate for who knows how long) the only way you could get it after school with a tonic (also known as soda for you old days non-New Englanders and progeny), usually a root beer, a Hires root beer to wash away the in-school blahs, especially the in-school cafeteria blahs.

Or how about plump Italian sausage, Tonio thickly-sliced, or spicy-side thinly-sliced pepperoni later when you had a couple of bucks handy to buy your own, and to share with your fellows (those fellows, hopefully, including girls, always hopefully, including girls) and finally got out from under family plain and, on those lucky occasions, and they were lucky like from heaven, when girl-dated you could show your stuff, your cool, manly stuff, and divide, divide, if you can believe that, the pizza half one, half the other fixings, glory be; onion or anchovies, oh no, the kiss of death, no way if you had the least hope for a decent night and worst, the nightmarish worst, when your date ordered her portion with either of these, although maybe, just maybe once or twice, it saved you from having to do more than a peck of a kiss when your date turned out not to be the dream vision you had hoped for; hams, green peppers, mushrooms, hamburg, and other oddball toppings I will not even discuss because such desecration of Tonio’s pizza, except, maybe extra cheese, such Americanized desecration , should have been declared illegal under some international law, no question; or, except, maybe again, if you had plenty of dough, had a had a few drinks, for your gourmet delight that one pig-pile hunger beyond hunger night when all the fixings went onto the thing. Whoa. Surely you would not find on Tonio’s blessed sign this modern thing, this Brussels sprouts, broccoli, alfalfa sprouts, wheat germ, whole wheat, soy, sea salt, himalaya salt, canola oil, whole food, pseudo-pizza not fit for manly (or womanly) consumption, no, not in those high cholesterol, high-blood pressure, eat today for tomorrow you may die days.

On the other side of the sign, although I will not rhapsodize about Tonio’s mastery of the submarine sandwich art (also known as heroes and about seventy-six other names depending on where you grew up, what neighborhood you grew up in, and who got there first, who, non-Puritan, got there first that is) are the descriptions of the various sandwich combinations (all come with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, the outlawed onions, various condiment spreads as desired along with a bag of potato chips so I won’t go into all that); cold cuts, basically bologna and cheese, maybe a little salami, no way, no way in hell am I putting dough up for what Ma prepared and I had for lunch whenever I couldn’t put two nickels together to get the school lunch, and the school lunch I already described as causing me to run to Tonio’s for a sweet reason portion of pizza by the slice just to kill the taste, no way is right; tuna fish, no way again for a different reason though, a Roman Catholic Friday holy, holy tuna fish reason besides grandma, high Roman Catholic saint Grandma, had that tuna fish salad with a splash of mayo on oatmeal bread thing down to a science, yah, Grandma no way I would betray you like that; roast beef, what are you kidding; meatballs (in that grand pizza sauce); sausage, with or without green peppers, steak and cheese and so on. The sign, in all its beatified Tonio misspelled glory. 

“Okay,” I said, that sign part seemed reasonable under the circumstances (that’s how Frankie put it, I’m just repeating his rationalization), except that never having made such a bet before I asked to witness a few Tonio flips first. “Deal,” said Frankie. Now my idea here, and I hope you follow me on this because it is not every day that you get to know how my mind works, or how it worked differently from star king Frankie, but it is not every day that you hear about a proposition based on high or low pizza tosses and there may be something of an art to it that I, or you, were not aware of. See, I was thinking, as many times as I had watched old saintly Tonio, just like everybody else, flip that dough to the heavens I never really thought about where it was heading, except those rare occasions when one hit the ceiling and stuck there. So maybe there was some kind of regular pattern to the thing. Like I say, I had seen Tonio flip dough more than my fair share of teenage life pizzas but, you know, never really noticed anything about it, kind of like the weather. As it turned out there was apparently no rhyme or reason to Tonio’s tosses just the quantity (that was the real secret to that good pizza crust, not the height of the throw), so after a few minutes I said "Bet." And bet is, high or low, my call, for a quarter a call (I had visions of filling that old jukebox of Tonio’s with my “winnings” because a new Dylan song had just come in that I was crazy to play about a zillion times, Mr. Tambourine Man). We are off.

I admit that I did pretty well for while that night and maybe was up a buck, and some change, at the end of the night. Frankie paid up, as Frankie always paid up, and such pay up without a squawk was a point of honor between us (and not just Frankie and me either, every righteous guy was the same way, or else), cash left on the table. I was feeling pretty good ‘cause I had just beaten the king of the hill at something, and that something was his own game. I rested comfortable on my laurels. Rested comfortably that is until a couple of nights later when we, as usual, were sitting in the Frankie-reserved seats (reserved that is unless there were real paying customers who wanted to eat their pizza in-house and then we, more or less, were given the bum’s rush) when Frankie said “Bet.” And the minute he said that I knew, I knew for certain, that we are once again betting on pizza tosses because when it came right down to it I knew, and I knew for certain, that Frankie’s defeat a few nights before did not sit well with him.

Now here is where things got tricky, though. Tonio, good old good luck charm Tonio, was nowhere in sight. He didn’t work every night and he was probably with his honey, and for an older dame she was a honey, dark hair, good shape, great, dark laughing eyes, and a melting smile. I could see, even then, where her charms beat out, even for ace pizza-flinger Tonio, tossing foolish old pizza dough in the air for some kids with time on their hands, no dough, teenage boys, Irish teenage boys to boot. However, Sammy, North Quincy High Class of ’62 (maybe, at least that is when he was supposed to graduate, according to Frankie, one of whose older brothers graduated that year), and Tonio’s pizza protégé was on duty. Since we already knew the ropes on this proposition I didn’t even bother to check and see if Sammy’s style was different from Tonio’s. Heck, it was all random, right?

This night we flipped for first call. Frankie won the coin toss. Not a good sign, maybe. I, however, like the previous time, started out quickly with a good run and began to believe that, like at Skeet ball (some call it Skee-ball but they are both the same–roll balls up a targeted area to win Kewpie dolls, feathery things, or a goof key chain for your sweetie) down at the amusement park, I had a knack for this form of betting. Anyway I was ahead about a buck or so. All of a sudden my “luck” went south. Without boring you with the epic pizza toss details I could not hit one right for the rest of the night. The long and short of it was that I was down about four dollars, cash on the table. Now Frankie’s cash on the table. No question. At that moment I was feeling about three-feet tall and about eight-feet under because nowadays cheap, no meaning four dollars, then was date money, Lucinda, fading Lucinda, date money. This was probably fatal, although strictly speaking the fate of that relationship was another story and I will not get into the Lucinda details, because when I think about it now that was just a passing thing, and you know about passing things- what about it.

What is part of the story though, and the now fifty years later still temperature-rising part of the story, is how Frankie, Frankie, king of the pizza parlor night, Frankie of a bunch of kindnesses, and of a bunch of treacheries, here treachery, zonked me on this betting scandal. What I didn’t know then was that I was set up, set up hard and fast, with no remorse by one Francis Xavier Riley, to the tenements, the cold-water flat tenements, born and his cohort Sammy. It seemed that Sammy owed Frankie for something, something never fully disclosed by either party, and the pay-off by Sammy to make him well was to “fix” the pizza tosses that night I just told you about, the night of the golden fleecing. Every time I said "high" Sammy, taking his coded signal from Frankie, went low and so forth. Can you believe a “king”, even a king of a backwater pizza parlor, would stoop so low?

Here is the really heinous part though, and keep my previous reference to fading Lucinda in mind when you read this. Frankie, sore-loser Frankie, not only didn’t like to lose but was also low on dough (a constant problem for both of us, and which consumed far more than enough of our time and energy than was necessary in a just, Frankie-friendly world) for his big Saturday night drive-in movie-car borrowed from his older brother, big-man-around-town date with one of his side sweeties (Joanne, his regular sweetie was out of town with her parents on vacation). That part, that unfaithful to Joanne part I didn’t care about because, once again truth to tell, old ever lovin’ sweetie Joanne and I did not get along for more reasons than you have to know. The part that burned me, and still burns me, is that I was naturally the fall-guy for some frail (girl in pizza parlor parlance time) caper he was off on.

Now I have mentioned that when we totaled up the score the Frankie kindnesses were way ahead of the Frankie treacheries, no question, which was why we were friends. Still, right this minute, right this 2014 minute, I am ready to go up to his swanky downtown Boston law office (where the men’s bathroom is larger than his whole youth time old cold- water flat tenement) and demand that four dollars back, plus interest. You know I am right on this one.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Beach Blanket Bongo- With The Falcons' You're So Fine –Take Two In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Beach Blanket Bongo- With The Falcons' You're So Fine –Take Two In Mind  

The Falcons

You're So Fine
You're So Fine
The Falcons

You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you

I love you, I love you
I need you, I need you
I walk, and I talk, about you

There's nothing in the world as sweet as your kiss
so fine, so fine
Every time we meet, my heart skips a beat
You're my first cup of coffee
( my last cup of tea) Bass line
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you

Sax solo
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you

*******

Sometimes it is funny how people will get into certain jags, will become aficionados, no, more than that will become single-minded fanatics if you don’t watch them very carefully and keep an appropriate distance say the distance you would keep from a cobra.  Some of us will go all out to be the best at golf or some such sport (or game, I guess you would call golf a game rather than sport because sport sounds too rough, sounds too in-your-face for such a gentile pastime, for the active mashing of some innocent white ball, yeah, let’s call it a game and move on) or will devout endless hours to the now thirty-seven, at least, flavors of yoga now passing through a rage period (no, I will not name all the variants, all the exotically-named mostly Hindu-sounding names,    except to say that such devotion at least makes health sense strangling some poor misbegotten caddie for not providing the right club for that perfect golf shot you had lines up) and others will climb straight-faced (theirs and the mountain’s) sheer rock precipices (no further comment needed except perhaps a sane citizen might just suggest that gentile pastime of golf to those sheer rocks). So be it.

Take me for example although I am not up for rigors of golf (or the premediated first-degree murder of some errant golf ball either), yoga (although thinking back the Kama Sutra came out of that same tradition so it might be worthy of some thought) or mountain-baiting (I like my rocks strictly in museums where they belong) recently I have been on a tear in reviewing individual[CL1]  CDs in an extensive generic commercial classic Rock ‘n’ Roll series (meaning now the 1950s and 1960s) entitled Rock and Roll Will Never Die. The impetus for reviewing that particular CD series at first had been in order to hear the song Your So Fine by the Falcons after I had been listening to The Dubs’ Could This Be Magic on YouTube. That combination was driven by a memory flashback to about 1959 when I used to pester (I am being kind here) every available girls in my seventh grade class by being timid boy flirty and calling her, well, “so fine.” Available girls by the way meaning not going “steady” with a boy, especially a guy who might be on the football team and who might take umbrage with another guy trying to cut his time. Although let’s say that if she was going with a golf guy I might cut his time since they live by some strange honor system, you know count exactly the number of strokes you took to complete the hole, including those three, not two, you clunked into the pond.  Available girl also meaning in seventh grade, unlike in sixth or fifth grade where the distinctions did not matter because they were all nuisances, girls who had gotten a shape and broken out of “stick-dom.” Those are the ones who were worthy of Jeff Sterling, that’s me, “so fine” designation. Such is the memory bank these days.  

While that particular review was driven by a song most of those reviews that I was crazy to listen to and speak about had been driven by the intriguing artwork which graced the covers of each CD, pinpoint artwork drawn in such a way to stir ancient memories of ancient loves, ancient loves, too many to count, anguishes, ditto, alienations, you give a number, angsts, infinite, and whatever else teen–age life could rain down on you just when you were starting to get a handle on the world, starting to do battle to find your place in the sun. Starting to feel too that this wicked old world might be a place worthy of the fight to preserve it but such thoughts were only flushed out later, much later after the dust of angst and alienation settled.  

Moreover these artwork covers reflected that precise moment in time, time being a very conscious and fungible concept then when we thought we would live forever and if we did not at least let us do our jailbreak rock and roll rock with the time we had, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may have been, to the themes of those artwork scenes. That fit in or didn’t fit in as the example of that flirty “your so fine” mantra that I would pin on any girl (remember any available girl not going steady and not with some big brute just in case that big brute is still holding a grudge).

Some artwork in the series like those that portrayed the terrors of Saturday night high school dance wallflower-dom, hanging around the you-name-it drugstore soda fountain waiting for some dreamy girl to drop her quarters in the juke-box and ask you, you of all people, what she should play to chase her blues away after some  guy left her for another girl and she needed a sound to shed a tear by and you there with that empty shoulder to ease the way, or how about a scene down at the seclude end of Adamsville Beach with a guy and his gal sitting watching the surf and listening to the be-bop radio before, well, let’s leave it at “before,” and picture this a few beauties sunning themselves at the beach waiting for Johnny Angel to make an appearance need almost no comment except good luck and we, we of that 1950s demographic, all recognize those signposts of growing up in the red scare cold war night. This cover that I am thinking of though  did not “speak” to me, a 1959 artwork cover from the time when the music died (meaning Elvis turned “square,” Chuck got caught with Mister’s girls and Jerry Lee failed to check the family tree).

On this cover, a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout, listening all afternoon to the transistor radio, trying to keep the sand from destroying your sandwich, getting all or red and pretty for Saturday night in white), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, were checking out the scene, the land scene for that minute they were not trying to ride the perfect wave, or thinking about that possibility. That checking out of course was to check out who was “hot” on the beach, who could qualify to be a “surfer girl” for those lonely nighttime hours when either the waves were flat or the guys had been in the water so long they had turned to prunes. That scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sisters, and women.

No question that this whole scene had been nothing but a California come hinter scene. No way that it has the look of my Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. This is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. But hold on, see as little as I know about West Coast 1950s growing up surfer culture I was suddenly struck by this hard fact. These pretty boys are, no question, “beach bums” no way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House La Jolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity one needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out into the humid night I will leave to the reader’s imagination.

As I noted before and commented on in the review the music, the 1959 music, that backed up this scene told us we were clearly in a trough, the golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry was fading, fading fast into what I can only describe as “bubble gum” music. Sure I listened to it, listened to it hard on my old transistor radio up in my lonely shared room or out on those surly, tepid Eastern beaches mainly because that was all that was being presented to us. Somehow the parents, the cops, the school administrators and, if you can believe this, some of those very same bikini girls who you thought were cool had flipped out and wanted to hear Fabian, Bobby Vee and Bobby Darin, got to the record guys, got to Tin Pan Alley and ordered them to make the music like some vanilla shake. So all of a sudden those “you’re so fine” beach blanket blondes were sold on faux surfer guys, flip-floppers and well-combed guys and had dumped the beat, the off-beat and the plainly loopy without a thought. Leaving hard-boiled Harvard Square by night denizens like me homeless, and girl-less more than less.

It was to be a while, a few years, until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock engulfed us. My times, times when I did not have to rely on some kids’ stuff flirty “your so fine” line but could impress the young women of my acquaintance (admittedly not the beach blanket bingo blondes of my youth but long straight brunette-haired women with faraway eyes and hungry haunted expressions) with eight million Child ballad, Village, traditional music, mountain music facts I had accumulated during that red scare cold war trough before the break-out. 

As the bulk of that CD’s contents attested to though we were in 1959 in the great marking time. There were, however, some stick-outs there that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a local boy who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while).

Note: After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two surfer guys, who actually did turn out to be landlubbers and were working the shoreline while serious surfers with no time for beach blanket bingo blondes sought that perfect wave stuff, are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.

---

 [CL1]

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billy’s, Billy From The Old Neighborhood, View-Jody Reynolds’ Endless Sleep

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billy’s, Billy From The Old Neighborhood, View-Jody Reynolds’ Endless Sleep

 JODY REYNOLDS
"Endless Sleep"
(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)

The night was black, rain fallin' down

Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around

Traced her footsteps down to the shore

‘fraid she's gone forever more

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?

Why did I leave her alone tonight?

That's why her footsteps ran into the sea

That's why my baby has gone from me.

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

Ran in the water, heart full of fear

There in the breakers I saw her near

Reached for my darlin', held her to me

Stole her away from the angry sea

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“You took your baby from me away.

My heart cried out “she's mine to keep

I saved my baby from an endless sleep.

[Fade]

Endless sleep, endless sleep

This is another of my tongue-in-cheek commentaries, the back story if you like, in the occasional sketches going back to the primordial youth time of the 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billy, William James Bradley, the mad-hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” neighborhood down in Adamsville not far outside of Boston. The “projects” for those not in the know, those of you who came of age in the leafy suburbs that we “projects” boys fiercely dreamed about once we saw what they looked like on television (and the girls, “projects” girls too dreamed our dreams too although there wasn’t so much mixing of the two until later, until we, meaning we corner boys figured out that those sticks that used to annoy us as they got some shape seemed a lot more interesting that we had previously recognized)were usually poorly constructed multi-unit complexes (ours were four-unit complexes, with many, many such complexes) originally built to house house-hungry returning World War II G.I.s who needed a place to stay while they were waiting on the golden age of the American dream to hit them.

But enough of that for this sketch is not about growing up poor in the land of plenty but growing up in the golden age of rock and roll that we hungry kids and kids from the leafy suburbs could both relate to. In those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days when he lost his moorings, went off to a hard scrabble life of crime, every kid, including one of his best friends, Markin, Peter Markin, me, lived to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every song that we would recognize as our own. This song, Endless Sleep, came out at a time when my family had been at the beginning of the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, I had begun to move away from Billy orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe. I was then in my 24/7 reading at the local public library branch phase unlike previously being Billy’s accomplice on various, well, let’s call them capers just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Still Billy, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billy I’m still pulling for you. Got it.

*****

Billy back again, William James Bradley, if you didn’t know. Markin’s pal, Peter Paul Markin’s pal, from over at Snug Harbor Elementary School and the pope of rock lyrics down here in “the projects.” The Adamsville projects, if you don’t know. Markin, who I hadn’t seen for a while since he told me his family was going to move out of the projects and who has developed this big thing for the local library and books lately, came by the other day to breathe in the fresh air of my rock universe-adorned bedroom when we got to talking about this latest record, Endless Sleep, by Jody Reynolds. You can usually depend on Markin to show up when there is some song he is not sure about blasts over the radio, or maybe when he wants to go mano y mano with me on those ill-advised times when he thinks he has an edge on me.

All the parents around here, at least the parents that care anyway, or those who have heard the lyrics screaming from their kid’s electricity plug-in blaring living room radio (that’s why they invented transistor radios-so parents wouldn’t, or couldn’t, catch on to what we are listening to- smarten up is what I say to those kids still listening on the family radio, for Christ’s sake) about the not so subtle suicide pact theme. [See lyrics above.] Yah, like that silly pact to jump in the ocean is what every kid is going to do when the going gets a little tough in the love department. Take a jump in the ocean, and call one and all to join them. Come on, will you. It's only a song. Besides what is really good about this one is that great back beat on the guitar and Jody Reynolds’ cool clothes and sideburns. I wish to high heaven I had both.

But see the pope of rock lyrics, me, can’t just leave this song like that. I have to decode it for the teeny-boppers around here or they will be clueless, including big-time book guy Markin. And that is really what is going to make the difference between us here. We had a battle royal over this one. See, Markin always wants to give big play to the “social” meaning of a song, whatever that is, you know where the thing sticks in society, where it speaks to some teen concern, at least in teeny-bopper society. Or maybe he has read some newspaper article where some highly-paid guy, a professor usually has spotted a trend and wants to warn every parent, cop and rat teacher of the consequences. Jesus. Yeah, and Markin is also the “sensitive” guy, usually. Like, for example, one time when he was pulling for the girl to get her guy back, or at least go back to her old boyfriend who was waiting by the midnight phone after Eddie split for parts unknown for some back-up love, in Eddie My Love. Or Markin had a kind thing to say about the dumb cluck of a bimbo who went back to the railroad track-stuck car to get some cheapjack class ring that the boyfriend probably grabbed from a cracker-jacks box in Teen Angel (although he agreed, agreed fully, that the dame was a dumb cluck on other grounds, on the grounds that she should have dumped a guy long before if his foolish junk-box of a car got stuck on a forlorn railroad track).

Here though I am the sensitive guy, if you can believe that. Here’s why. It seems that Markin has some kind of exception to the “social” rule when it comes to the ocean, to the sea, christ, probably to some scum pond for all I know as the scene for suicide attempts. Apparently he is in the throes of some King Neptune frenzy and took umbrage (his word, not mind, I don’t go to the library much) at the idea that someone would desecrate the sea that way, our homeland the sea the way he put it. Like old Neptune hasn’t brought seventy-three types of hell on us with his hurricane tidal waves, his overflowing the seawalls across the channel from us, his flooding everything within three miles of the coast, or when he just throws his flotsam and jetsam (my words, from school, I like them) on the “projects” beaches whenever he gets fed up. So I have to defend this frail’s action, and gladly.

You know it really is unbelievable once you start to think about it how many of these songs don’t have people in them with names, real names, nicknames, anything to tag on them. Here it’s the same old thing. Markin would just blithely go on and makes up names but I’ll just give you the “skinny” without the Markin literary touches, okay. Rather than calling the girl every name in the book for disturbing the fishes or the plankton like Markin I am trying to see what happened here to drive her to such a rash action. Obviously they, the unnamed boy and girl, had an argument, alright a big argument if that satisfies you. What could it have been about? Markin, wise guy Markin, wants to make it some little thing like a missed date, or the guy didn't call or something. Maybe it was, but I think the poor girl was heartbroken about something bigger. Maybe boyfriend didn’t want to “go steady” or maybe he wasn’t ready to be her ever lovin’ one and only. Or maybe he didn’t was to satisfy her hormonal problem if you can believe that. Some guys are like that although I don’t know any, any that would pass that kind of thing up. Let me put it this way it was big, not Markin’s b.s. stuff.

Okay she went over the edge, no question, running down to the sea and jumping in. On a rainy night to boot. Hey she had it bad, whatever it was. But see old Neptune, Markin’s friend, maybe father for all I know, was taunting said boyfriend, saying he was going to take boyfriend’s baby away. Well, frankly, and old wimpy Markin dismissed this out of hand, those are fighting words in the projects, and not just the projects either, when one guy tries to horn in on another guy’s baby when he is not done with her, maybe even after too. Like I say those are fighting words around here.

And the girl, given the cold and what that does to you when you have been in the ocean too long was forced to taunt her lover boy, trying to bring him down too so no other frail could be with him. Just like a girl. This is the part I like though, although Markin would probably take umbrage (again), the boyfriend was ready to reclaim his honey, come hell or high water. He wasn’t done with her and so old man Neptune took a beating that night. Yah, he’s taking his baby, and taking her no questions asked, back from that nasty relentless sea. A little justice in this wicked old world. Chalk one up for our side. Yes, Billy, William James Bradley, is happy, pleased, delighted and any other words you can find in the library that this story has a happy ending. Markin’s homeland sea mush be damned.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billie’s Break-Out Adventure-With Elvis’ Are You Lonesome Tonight In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Billie’s Break-Out Adventure-With Elvis’ Are You Lonesome Tonight In Mind   

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

Are you lonesome tonight,
Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day
When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?
Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?
Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

I wonder if you're lonesome tonight
You know someone said that the world's a stage
And each must play a part.
Fate had me playing in love you as my sweet heart.
Act one was when we met, I loved you at first glance
You read your line so cleverly and never missed a cue
Then came act two, you seemed to change and you acted strange
And why I'll never know.
Honey, you lied when you said you loved me
And I had no cause to doubt you.
But I'd rather go on hearing your lies
Than go on living without you.
Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there
With emptiness all around
And if you won't come back to me
Then make them bring the curtain down.

Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

“I hate Elvis, I love Elvis,” Sam Lowell could still hear fifty years later the echo of his old from nowhere down and out low-rent public assistance  “the projects” corner boy, William James Bradley, also known as Billie. Not Billy like some billy-goat, like some damn animal, as he declaimed to all who would listen, mainly Sam toward the end before Sam had to move away from the neighborhood or get caught up in Billie’s then new found interest in small handle crime when the better angel of his nature fled in horror at his fresh-worn path after the umpteenth failure to get what he thought was his due legally. Billie from the hills, born out in some mad night, born out of some untamed passion in New Hampshire to newly-wed parents just before the shot-gun, some father’s shot-gun, called out in the wilds of Nashua up in live free country New Hampshire. Billie Bradley a mad demon of a kid and Sam’s best friend down in the Adamsville South Elementary school located smack in the middle of that from-nowhere-down-and-out-low-rent-the-projects of ill-fated memory. Sam and Billie grew apart after a while, after those Billie hurts grew too huge to be contained this side of the law, and we will learn why in a minute, but for a long time, a long kid time long, Billie, Billie of a hundred dreams, Billie of fifty (at least) screw-ups made Sam laugh and made his day when things were tough, like they almost always were at his beat down broke-down family house.

Sam thought and laughed thinking that, you know, fifty some years later Billie was right. We hated Elvis, we young boys, we what do they call them now, oh yes, those tween boys, those times before we know what was what in our new feelings, our funny feelings that no one, well, no parent would explain to us, knew what was what about those stick girls turning to shapes and adding fuel to the fire of  our funny feelings, oh what a time of lamenting, especially at that time when all the girls, the young girls got weak-kneed over Elvis  and he made the older girls (and women, some mothers even) sweat and left no room for ordinary mortal boys, “the projects boys” most of all, on their “dream” card. And most especially, hard as we tried, for brown-haired or tow-headed, blue-eyed ten, eleven and twelve year old boys who didn’t know how to dance. Dance like some Satan’s disciple as Elvis did in Jailhouse Rock every move calculated to make some furious female night sweats dreams.

Or when we had to give up in despair after failing to produce a facsimile of that Elvis sneer that sneer that only got them, the girls, more excited as they dreamed about taking that sneer off his face and making him, well, happy. We both, Billie and me, got pissed off at my brother, my older brother, Prescott, who already had half a stake in some desperate outlaw schemes and would later crumble under the weight of too many jail terms, because, he looked very much like Elvis and although he had no manners, and no time for girls, they were all following him around like he was the second coming. I don’t think he cared and he would certainly not listen to me about what I could do to get the girls. When Billie caught up with him later they were not worried about girls, or not principally about girls, but about small-bore armed robberies of penny-ante gas stations for six dollars and change. Christ there really is no justice in this wicked old world, either way.

And we loved Elvis too for giving us, us young impressionable boys at least as far as we knew then, our own music, our own "jump' and our own jail-break from the tired old stuff we heard on the radio and television that did not ‘”speak” to us. The stuff that our parents dreamed by if they dreamed, or had dreamed by when their worlds were fresh and young back before we were born, back in that endless Great Depression night and World War II slugfest that they were “protecting” us against such repetitions, and not succeeding. If they had had time for dreams what with trying to make ends meet and avoiding bill-collectors, dunners, and repo men by the score each and every day.  We loved Elvis for the songs that he left behind. Not the goofy Tin Pan Alley or something  like that inspired “happy” music that went along with his mostly maligned, and rightly so, films but the stuff from the Sun Records days, the stuff from when he was “from hunger”. That music, as we also “from hunger,” was like a siren call to break-out and then we caught his act on television, maybe the Ed Sullivan Show or something like that, and that was that. I probably walk “funny,” knees and hips out of whack, today from trying way back then to pour a third-rate imitation of his moves into my body to impress the girls.

But enough of Elvis’ place in the pre-teen and teen rock pantheon this is after all about Billie, and Elvis’ twisted spell on the poor boy. Now you know about Billie dreams, about his outlandish dreams to break-out of the projects by parlaying his good looks (and they were even then) and his musical abilities (good but the world was filled with Billies from hunger and on reflection he did not have that crooner’s voice that would make the girls weep and get wet) or you should, from another story, a story about Bo Diddley and how Billie wanted to, as a change of pace, break from the Elvis rut to create his own “style.” That was to emulate old Bo and his Afro-Carib beat. What Billie did not know, could not know since he had no television in the house (nor did my family so we always went to neighbors who did have one or watched in front of Raymond’s Department Store with their inviting televisions on in the display windows begging us to purchase them) and only knew rock and roll from his transistor radio was that the guy, that old Bo was black. Well, in hard, hard post-World War II Northern white Adamsville "the projects" filled to the brim with racial animosity poor unknowing Billie got blasted away one night at a talent show by one of the older, more knowing boys who taunted him mercilessly about why he wanted to emulate a n----r for his troubles.

That sent Billie, Billie from the hills, back to white bread Elvis pronto. See, Billie was desperate to impress the girls way before I was aware of them, or their charms. Half, on some days, three-quarters of our conversations (I won’t say monologues because I did get a word in edgewise every once in a while when Billie got on one of his rants) revolved around doing this or that, something legal, something not, to impress the girls. And that is where the “hate Elvis” part mentioned above comes in. Billie believed, and he may still believe it today wherever he is, that if only he could approximate Elvis’ looks, look, stance, and substance that all the girls would be flocking to him. And by flocking would create a buzz that would be heard around the world. Nice dream, Billie, nice my brother.  

Needless to say, such an endeavor required, requires money, dough, kale, cash, moola whatever you want to call it. And what twelve-year old project boys didn’t have, and didn’t have in abundance was any of that do-re-mi (that’s the age time of this story, about late 1957, early 1958) And no way to get it from missing parents, messed up parents, or just flat out poor parents. Billie’s and mine were the latter, poor as church mice. No, that‘s not right because church mice would not do (in the way that I am using it, and as we used it back then to signify the respectable poor who “touted” their Catholic pious poorness as a badge of honor in this weaseling wicked old world), would not think about, would not even breathe the same air of what we were about to embark on. A life of crime, kid stuff crime but I'll leave that to the reader’s judgment.

See, on one of Billie’s rants he got the idea in his head, and, maybe, it got planted there by something that he had read about Elvis (Christ, he read more about that guy that he did about anybody else once he became an acolyte), that if he had a bunch of rings on all his fingers the girls would give him a tumble. (A tumble in those days being a hard kiss on the lips for about twelve seconds or “copping” a little feel, and if I have to explain that last in more detail you had better just move on). But see, also Billie’s idea was that if he has all those rings, especially for a projects boy then it would make his story that he had set to tell easier. And the story was none other than that he had written to Elvis (possible) and spoke to him man to man about his situation (improbable) and Elvis, Elvis the king, Elvis from “nowhere Mississippi, some place like Tupelo, like we were from the nowhere Adamsville projects, Elvis bleeding heart, had sent him the rings to give him a start in life (outrageously impossible). Christ, I don’t believe old Billie came up with that story even now when I am a million years world-weary.

First you needed the rings and as the late honorable bank robber, Willie Sutton, said about robbing banks-that’s where the money is-old Billie, blessed, beatified Billie, figured out, and figured out all by himself, that if you want to be a ring-stealer then you better go to the jewelry store because that is where the rings were. The reader, and rightly so, now might ask where was his best buddy during this time and why was that best buddy not offering wise counsel about the pitfalls of crime and the virtues of honesty and incorruptibility. Well, when Billie went off on his rant you just waited to see what played out but the real reason was, hell, maybe I could get a ring for my ring-less fingers and be on my way to impress the girls too. I think they call it in the law books, or some zealous prosecuting attorney could call it, aiding and abetting.

But enough of that superficial moralizing. Let’s get to the jewelry store, the best one in the downtown of working-class Adamsville in the time before the ubiquitous malls. We walked a couple of miles to get there on the one road out of the peninsula where the projects were located, plotting all the way. As we entered the downtown area, Bingo, the Acme Jewelry Store (or some name like that) jumped up at us. Billie was as nervous as a colt and I was not far behind, although on this caper I was just the “stooge”, if that. I’m the one who was to wait outside to see if John Law came by. Once at my post I said- “Okay, Billie, good luck.”

And strangely enough his luck was good that day, and many days after, although those days after were not ring days (small grocery store robberies later turned to armed robberies and jail terms the last I heard). That day though his haul was five rings. Five shaky rings, shaky hands Billie, as we walked, then started running, away from the downtown area. When we got close to home we stopped near the beach where we lived to see up close what the rings looked like. Billie yelled, “Damn.” And why did he yell that word. Well, apparently in his terror (his word to me) at getting caught he just grabbed what was at hand. And what was at hand were five women’s rings. At that moment he practically cried out about how was he going to impress girls, ten, eleven or twelve- year old girls, even if they were as  naïve as us, and maybe more so, that Elvis, the King, was your bosom buddy and you were practically his only life-line adviser with five women’s rings? Damn, damn is right.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Frankie’s Song -With Elvis' Jailhouse Rock In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Frankie’s Song -With Elvis' Jailhouse Rock In Mind    

 

Jailhouse Rock

The warden threw a party in the county jail
The prison band was there and they began to wail
The band was jumpin' and the joint began to swing
You should've heard them knocked-out jailbirds sing

Let's rock; everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Spider Murphy played the tenor saxophone
Little Joe was blowin' on the slide trombone
The drummer boy from Illinois went crash, boom, bang
The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang

Let's rock; everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Number forty-seven said to number three
"You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see
I sure would be delighted with your company
Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me"

Let's rock; everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Sad sack was sittin' on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin' all alone
The warden said, "Hey, buddy, don't you be no square
If you can't find a partner, use a wooden chair"

Let's rock; everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Shifty Henry said to Bugs, "For Heaven's sake
No one's lookin'; now's our chance to make a break"
Bugsy turned to Shifty and he said, "Nix, nix
I want to stick around a while and get my kicks"

Let's rock; everybody, let's rock
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock
Dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock
Dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock
Dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock
Dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock

Songwriters: LEIBER, JERRY / STOLLER, MIKE

Jailhouse Rock lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

A while back when I was doing a series of scenes, scenes from the hitchhike road in search of the great American West night in the late 1960s, later than the time of Frankie’s, Frankie Riley’s early 1960s old working- class neighborhood kingly time as our corner boy leader in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys that I want to tell you about now, I noted that there had been about a thousand truck-stop diner stories left over from those old hitchhike road days. On reflection though, I realized that there really had been about three diner stories with many variations. Not so with Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories. I have got a thousand of them, or so it seems, all different. Hey, you already, if you have been attentive, know a few Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories (okay, I will stop, or try to, stop using that full designation and just call him plain, old, ordinary, vanilla Frankie just like everybody else).

Yeah you already know the Frankie story (see I told you I could do it) about how he lazily spent a hot late August 1960 summer before entering high school day working his way up the streets of the old neighborhood to get some potato salad (and other stuff too) for his family’s Labor Day picnic. And he got a cameo appearance in the tear-jerk, heart-rendering saga of my first day of high school in that same year where I, vicariously, attempted to overthrow his lordship with the nubiles (girls, for those not from the old neighborhood, although there were plenty of other terms of art to designate the fair sex then, most of them getting their start in local teenage social usage from Frankie’s mouth). That effort, that attempt at coping his “style,” like many things associated with one-of-a-kind Frankie, as it turned out, proved unsuccessful.

More recently I took you in a roundabout way to a Frankie story in a review of a 1985 Roy Orbison concert documentary, Black and White Nights. That story centered around my grinding my teeth whenever I heard Roy’s Running Scared because one of Frankie’s twists (see nubiles above) played the song endlessly to taint the love smitten but extremely jealous Frankie on the old jukebox at the pizza parlor, old Salducci's Pizza Shop, that we used to hang around once in a while during our high school days. It’s that story, that drugstore soda fountain story, that brought forth a bunch of memories about those pizza parlor days and how Frankie, for most of his high school career, was king of the hill at that locale. And king, king arbiter, of the social doings of those around him as well.

And who was Frankie? Frankie of a thousand stories, Frankie of a thousand treacheries, Frankie of a thousand kindnesses, and, oh yeah, Frankie, my bosom friend in high school. Well let me just steal some sentences from that old August summer walk story and that first day of school saga because really Frankie and I went back to perilous middle school days (a.k.a. junior high days for old-timers) when he saved my bacon more than one time, especially from making a fatal mistake with the frails (see nubiles and twists above). He was, maybe, just a prince then working his way up to kingship. But even he, as he endlessly told me that summer before high school, August humidity doldrums or not, was along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit anxious about being “little fish in a big pond” freshmen come that 1960 September.

Especially, a pseudo-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it "style" over there at the middle school. That “style” involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long-panted, flannel-shirted, work boot-shod, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to humankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls, then or now. Well, as it turned out, yes it was. Frankie right. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading. Let’s not even get into that story, the Frankie part of it now, or maybe, ever. We survived high school, okay.

But see, that is why, the Frankie why, the why of my push for the throne, the kingship throne, when I entered high school and that old Frankie was grooming himself for like it was his by divine right. When the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” (high school) I spent that summer, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at the middle school (junior high, okay) called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you before that was my pose, my Frankie-engineered pose. I just wanted to see what he, old Willie, was talking about when he used that word. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knew idol Jack Kennedy, personally, and was crazy for old-time guys like Jackson), and Catcher In The Rye (Holden was me, me to a tee). Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out. There was more.

Here's what was behind the why. I intended, and I swear I intended to even on the first nothing doing day of that new school year in that new school in that new decade (1960) to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, mad monk, girl-chasing Frankie, who knew every arcane fact that mankind had produced and had told it to every girl who would listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Yes, Frankie, my buddy of buddies, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who kindly navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago he was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. I always got dragged in his wake, including as lord chamberlain in his pizza parlor kingdom. What I didn’t know then, wet behind the ears about what was what in life's power struggles, was if you were going to overthrow the king you’d better do it all the way.  But, see if I had done that, if I had overthrown him, I wouldn’t have had any Frankie stories to tell you, or help with the frills in the treacherous world of high school social life (see nubiles, frails and twists above. Why don’t we just leave it like this. If you see the name Frankie and a slangy word when you think I am talking about girls that's girls. Okay?)

As I told you in that Roy Orbison review, when Roy was big, big in our beat down around the edges, some days it seemed beat six ways to Sunday working-class neighborhood in the early 1960s, we all used to hang around the town pizza parlor, or one of them anyway, that was also conveniently near our high school as well. Maybe this place was not the best one to sit down and have a family-sized pizza with salad and all the fixings in, complete with family, or if you were fussy about décor but the best tasting pizza, especially if you let it cool for a while and no eat it when it was piping hot right out of the oven.

Moreover, this was the one place where the teen-friendly owner, a big old balding Italian guy, Tonio Salducci, at least he said he was Italian and there were plenty of Italians in our town in those days so I believed him but he really looked Greek or Armenian to me, let us stay in the booths if it wasn’t busy, and we behaved like, well, like respectable teenagers. And this guy, this old Italian guy, blessed Leonardo-like master Tonio, could make us all laugh, even me, when he started to prepare a new pizza and he flour-powdered and rolled the dough out and flipped that sucker in the air about twelve times and about fifteen different ways to stretch it out. Sometimes people would just stand outside in front of the doubled-framed big picture window and watch his handiwork in utter fascination.

Jesus, Tonio could flip that thing. One time, and you know this is true because you probably have your own pizza dough on the ceiling stories, he flipped the sucker so high it stuck to the ceiling, right near the fan on the ceiling, and it might still be there for all I know (the place still is, although not him). But this is how he was cool; he just started up another without making a fuss. Let me tell you about him, Tonio, sometime but right now our business to get on with Frankie, alright.

So there was nothing unusual, and I don’t pretend there is, in just hanging out having a slice of pizza (no onions, please, in case I get might lucky tonight and that certain she comes in, the one that I have been eyeing in school all week until my eyes have become sore, that thin, long blondish-haired girl wearing those cashmere sweaters showing just the right shape,  please, please, James Brown, please come in that door), some soft drink (which we called tonic in New England in those days but which you call, uh, soda), usually a locally bottled root beer, and, incessantly dropping nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukebox.

(And that "incessantly" allowed us to stay since we were paying customers with all the rights and dignities that status entailed, unless, of course, they needed our seats). But here is where it all comes together, Frankie and Tonio the pizza guy, from day one, got along like crazy. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, map of Ireland, red-headed, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Frankie got along like crazy with Italian guy Tonio. That was remarkable in itself because, truth be told, there was more than one Irish/ Italian ethnic, let me be nice, “dispute” in those days. Usually over “turf”, like kids now, or some other foolish one minute thing or another.

Moreover, and Frankie didn’t tell me this for a while, Frankie, my bosom buddy Frankie, like he was sworn to some Omerta oath, didn’t tell me that Tonio was “connected.” For those who have been in outer space, or led quiet lives, or don’t hang with the hoi polloi that means with the syndicate, the hard guys, the Mafia. If you don’t get it now go down and get the Godfather trilogy and learn a couple of things, anyway. This "connected" stemmed, innocently enough, from the jukebox concession which the hard guys controlled and was a lifeblood of Tonio's teenage-draped business, and not so innocently, from his role as master numbers man (pre-state lottery days, okay) and "bookie" (nobody should have to be told what that is, but just in case, he took bets on horses, dogs, whatever, from the guys around town, including, big time, Frankie's father, who went over the edge betting like some guys fathers' took to drink).

And what this “connected” also meant, this Frankie Tonio-connected meant, was that no Italian guys, no young black engineer-booted, no white rolled-up tee-shirted, no blue denim- dungareed, no wide black-belted, no switchblade-wielding, no-hot-breathed, garlicky young Italian studs were going to mess with one Francis Xavier Riley, his babes (you know what that means, right?), or his associates (that’s mainly me). Or else.

Now, naturally, connected to "the connected" or not, not every young tough in any working class town, not having studied, and studied hard, the sociology of the town, is going to know that some young Irish punk, one kind of "beatnik' Irish punk with all that arcane knowledge in order to chase those skirts and a true vocation for the blarney is going to know that said pizza parlor owner and its “king”, king hell king, are tight. Especially at night, a weekend night, when the booze has flowed freely and that hard-bitten childhood abuse that turned those Italian guys (and Irish guys too) into toughs hits the fore. But they learn, and learn fast.

Okay, you don’t believe me. One night, one Saturday night, one Tonio-working Saturday night (he didn’t always work at night, not Saturday night anyway, because he had a honey, a very good-looking honey too, dark hair, dark laughing eyes, dark secrets she wouldn’t mind sharing as well it looked like to me but I might have been wrong on that) two young toughs came in, Italian toughs from the look of them. This town then , by the way, if you haven’t been made aware of it before is strictly white, mainly Irish and Italian, so any dark guys, are Italian period, not black, Hispanic, Indian, Asian or anything else. Hell, I don’t think those groups even passed through; at least I don’t remember seeing any, except an Arab, once.

So Frankie, your humble observer (although I prefer the more intimate umbrella term "associate" under these circumstances) and one of his squeezes (not his main squeeze, Joanne) were sitting at the king’s table (blue vinyl-seated, white Formica table-topped, paper place-setting, condiment-laden center booth of five, front of double glass window, best jukebox and sound position, no question) splitting a Saturday night whole pizza with all the fixings (it was getting late, about ten o’clock, and I have given up on that certain long blondish-haired she who said she might meet me so onions anchovies, garlic for all I know don’t matter right now) when these two ruffians come forth and petition (ya, right) for our table. Our filled with pizza, drinks, condiments, odds and ends papery, and the king, his consort (of the evening, I swear I forget which one) and his lord chamberlain.

Since there were at least two other prime front window seats available Frankie denied the petition out of hand. Now in a righteous world this should have been the end of it. But what these hard guys, these guys who looked like they might have had shivs (ya, knives, shape knives, for the squeamish out there) and only see two geeky "beatnik" guys and some unremarkable signora do was to start to get loud and menacing (nice word, huh?) toward the king and his court. Menacing enough that Tonio, old pizza dough-to-the-ceiling throwing Tonio, took umbrage (another nice word, right?) and came over to the table very calmly. He called the two gentlemen aside, and talking low and almost into their ears, said some things that we could not hear. All we knew was that about a minute later these two behemoths, these two future candidates for jailbird-dom, were walking, I want to say walking gingerly, but anyway quickly, out the door into the hard face of Saturday night.

We thereafter proceeded to finish our kingly meal, safe in the knowledge that Frankie was indeed king of the pizza parlor night. And also that we knew, now knew in our hearts because Frankie and I talked about it later, that behind every king there was an unseen power. Christ, and I wanted to overthrow Frankie. I must have been crazy like a loon.