***Out In The Be-Bop Night-Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

A while back, maybe three years ago now,  I was enthralled by the idea of connecting various songs to the on-going political struggles of the day, for example, during the height of the Occupy movement during  late 2011  I was highlighting Bob Marley’s Stand Up! Fight Back. Or, by reference, going back to the 1960s struggles of my youth, for example, using Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ as a song to express that new breeze many of us felt was coming during those turbulent times and drove us in political activism. I presented that series under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By. My idea was to post some songs that I thought would help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our “newer world” (since the current world has gone to hell in a hand basket, no question). I did not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they had been done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist like Woody Guthrie, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, I envisioned a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would have been problematic from a political prospective, it would suffice for the series.

I have had a few comments from readers who wondered about the connection between music and political struggle and that got me to thinking about my own relationship to music and to the notion, very prevalent back in the1960s (and subject to  a small retro revival lately), that music (and maybe the larger category of counter-cultural change) was the revolution. Time and tide have disclosed the limitations, the extreme limitations, of that thought. However in the interest of “cutting up old torches” I recently revisited that idea first articulated several years ago in a review of the work of the Jim Morrison-led rock band The Doors after reading that the group’s long time piano man had passed away.   

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In my jaded youth, an early 1960s youth, at a time when rock and roll had turned in on itself after Elvis died (or went into the Army which from a youth-driven musical standpoint was the same thing), Chuck Berry got caught with Mister’s hands-off daughters, Jerry Lee Lewis forgot about acceptable degrees of cousin-age and rock music turned Booby Vee vanilla I developed an ear for other music, roots music whether I was conscious of that term or not. The origin of that interest, pursued in local Harvard Square and Charles Street (Boston) coffeehouses then the rage (and a very nice venue for a “cheap” date, mainly coffee), initially centered on the blues, country and city that I would hear on Sunday night coming out of a big airwaves night  Chicago radio show, Doctor Sax’s Blues Hour. So I went crazy for the likes of Son House and his mad monk sweating National steel guitar, Skip James and his falsetto voice cranking out old time 1930s bust –out blues like my favorite I ‘d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man ( whee), silky Mississippi John Hurt clean picking on stuff like his Frankie and Albert,  electrified Muddy Waters doing Mannish Child , Howlin’ Wolf practically eating his harmonica on How Many More Years and Elmore James riffing with his version of Robert Johnson’s Dust My Broom.

Those blues staples added to the early rock and roll I that I previously craved that I mentioned above (before the vanilla cold war), you know the Sun Record rockabillies and Chess Record R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike Turner made me very curious about what today I would call the American song book but then something, something without a name. Later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music got added to the bag, especially the protest to high heaven sort from the likes of Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. (and reaching back into time, dust bowl and Mister James Crow south 1930s time, guys like Woody Guthrie and Josh White).

I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Only meaning that I was rootless, 1950s standard one –size-fits-all Americanized rootless, or at least not organically rooted in any musical genre.  Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on.  The subject of the following review, Jim Morrison and the Doors, is an example.

The Doors as a nodal point of roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues which in prevalent in their riffs and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of the Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native American culture that drove the beat of many of their trance-like songs like The End. For a minute, or more than a minute, since he and the band liked long songs you had a sense that they were reaching back to ten thousand year warrior times when this continent was fresh and they, those ancient warriors went out  seeking the “ghost of the brown buffalo,” or  trance-danced “walked with the king.” It took many peyote buttons to coax out that campfire flame against the canyon wall night vision, then and now.  

More than one rock critic has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up, the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here. What a reviewer with that opinion has to do is determine whether any particular CD captures the Doors at their best. This reviewer advises that if you want to buy only one Doors CD that would be The Best of The Doors. If you want to trace their evolution more broadly, or chronologically, other CDs do an adequate job but they are helter-skelter. That CD edition has, with maybe one or two exceptions, all the stuff  rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.    

A note on Jim Morrison as an icon of the 1960’s. He was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young.  The slogan of the day (or hour)-“drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix the combination up. Then. Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including this writer, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well. Whatever excesses were committed by the generation of ’68, and there were many, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. The natural follies of those brethren stepping on new territory and mapping out new turf without any particular guidance (and seeking none, desperately seeking none). Working without a net as one cultural wag put it at time. Our opponents, exemplified by one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. Enough said.