The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind- “The Best Of The Chicago Blues”

A YouTube film clip of Muddy Water's performing his classic Chicago blues tune, Mannish Boy.

[I have decided to cast the rumor mill struggle to the wind after this last blast since I really do want to comment in these introductions about how they came about or what incidents from back in the 1950s and 1960s brought them to mind. If the reader does not know why I am chucking the rumor mill it has to do with my demise as site manager of this site and my subsequent “disappearance” to the West (as Jim Morrison of The Doors said in one of his signature songs The End “the West is the best, get here and we will do the right”) to find work when I was frozen out of the publishing business in the East as the kiss of death “hard to work with.” The rumors flew fast and furious as everything from I was done in by the “victors” in the internal struggle that I lost like we were back Stalin-Trotsky times to my appointment as Utah (now Utah anyway) Senatorial candidate Mitt Romney’s press secretary to my “pimping” some surfer girl waitress out in La Jolla (I did meet a surfer girl waitress, Damask, but I wasn’t pimping her for the real story see the last published part of this series dated March 19, 2018) to living with a drag queen in San Francisco getting sky high on opium. (See that same archive story for the real deal on that.)

So there is no wonder that I have had it with defending myself against the water cooler rumor mill here and in half the publications in the East from people trying to besmirch my reputation and to enhance their own. I knew I was doomed when somebody I think from Women Today stated flat out that my surfer girl defense story was made of whole cloth and that I probably did take advantage of the young woman to make some money so I could get out from under some alimony and college tuition payments (that young women by the way was not some naïve twenty-something although she admittedly look younger than her thirty-something years and is working on her degree in physical therapy). The writer was trying to tar me with the same brush as all the big time celebrity sexual predators who have been hung out to dry in the recent past and maybe rightly so. Reason. I did not let Damask tell her side of the story. Jesus what is this supposed to be a police gazette tabloid complete with lurid fuzzy photographs.

You know Seth Garth a film reviewer here had it right in a recent review of a James Bond 007 film (why this Bond series is being reviewed is beyond me but I will let it pass) where he got embroiled in the middle of a “controversy” about who played the James Bond role cinematically in the long 50^th plus years of the series when he mentioned that the film review profession was dog eat dog. That every reviewer is always angling to move up the food chain by downgrading the opinions of the competition, even though who work for the same outfit.

What you may not know is that at the publication level, among publishers, hard copy or these days on-line, that same fierce dog eat dog ethos applies as well. Except the publishers do a lot of things by indirection, a lot by having their stooge writers take up the cudgels against the opposition and do what they can to diminish whatever is being put out by those publications. This is where I think that attack from Women Today is coming from. See a long time ago Leslie Dumont was a stringer here when she was Josh Breslin’s companion and feeling, maybe rightly frustrated she left for a by-line in Women Today. Recently she was “lured” back to this publication and in time-honored tradition she had been bad-mouthed as now incapable of writing a complete English sentence, stuff like that. Naturally to get at me, a man well known in the industry as a founder of this publication, since I no longer run things they took a run at a simple introduction to defend myself against some pretty loony charges like “pimping” for a surfer girl out West. That gives you an idea of the general climate in the industry these days and why I have thrown in the towel in trying to scotch every half-baked rumor that has come down the pike.             

There are a couple of very nasty rumors I want to mention and be done with this and put me to the rack if you want but let me just finish this series with some serious insights and not blather. While I was explaining my relationship with that surfer girl, with Damask, I mentioned that I actually did need money and so after she and I agreed that she would come East at some point when I was settled I went up to San Francisco to see if I could raise some money from two sources-Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen who I have known since he was Timmy Riley back in the old working class Acre neighborhood in growing up town and who I sent money to for years to keep her nightclub afloat and a gal I know going back to Summer of Love, 1967 days out in San Francisco who subsequently became Madame La Rue running a high end brothel for mostly Asian businessman with a kink for the wild side in Frisco town. I have helped her as well. As I noted in the last posting I got most of the money from Miss Judy but I also got some from the woman known as Madame Le Rue. On the basis of that kindness I was accused of helping her run a whorehouse in any place from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong. Jesus.             

All the previous rumors though went to my reputation, went to my standing in the industry and such but the worse rumor of all since it involves my legal situation is the vile rumor that I was “fronting” or “muling” for some Mexican drug cartel looking to broaden their markets in American and I was to be a prime distributor. Frankly I don’t know what to say about this except I think Jack Callahan hit it right on the head. I might have been a big dope-imbiber back in the day, may have done a little dealing/swapping when I needed dough for something but that is ancient history. But the number one thing that would have prohibited me from even thinking about doing some kind of deal with some nefarious cartel is the fate of my, our old friend from the Acre the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin who for a whole lot of reasons which I will not go into now since others have written about the subject already went off the tracks in the mid-1970s and while trying to get out from under wound up with a couple of slugs to the head in some back alley in Sonora, Mexico and a potter’s field grave there. Allan Jackson]          

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CD Review

The Best Of The Chicago Blues, various artists, Vanguard Records, 1987

Johnny Prescott daydreamed his way through the music that he was listening to just then on the little transistor that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, had given him for Christmas after he has taken a fit when she quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy. No, he screamed he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was, and didn’t have, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe or Harry James 1940s war drum thing on the huge immobile radio downstairs in the Prescott living room. Strictly squaresville, cubed.

But as he listened to this the Shangra-la by The Four Coins that just finished up a few seconds ago and as this Banana Boat song by The Tarriers was starting its dreary trip he was not sure that those ties wouldn’t have been a better deal, and more practical too. Ya, this so-called rock station, WAPX, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new, now that Elvis was gone, killer rocker, Chuck Berry who proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town. As he turned the volume down a little lower (that tells the tale right there, friends) as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from) by Russ Hamilton he was ready to throw in the towel though.

Desperate he fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 blasted the airwaves. But funny it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ it was actually a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that performance was finished fish-tailing right after that one was a huge harmonica intro and what could only be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. No need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, was direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.

Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just now the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never heard it because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to have even strength to pick Be-Bop Benny’s live show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. And so when he heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp and up with his Someday added in he was hooked. And you know he started to see what Billie, Billie Bradley from over in Adamsville, meant when at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billie and the Jets, he mentioned that if you want to get rock and roll back you had better listen to blues, and if you want to listen to blues, blues that rock then you had very definitely had better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.

And Johnny thought, Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand why that beat, that da,da, da, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be in his genes.