Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the legendary Lavern Baker performing her classic, Jim Dandy to set the tone of r this sketch.
I have spent tons of time and reams of cyberspace “paper” in my ill-winded old age holding forth (nice, right, much better than pontificating, no question, or worst misty dream memory lane trance muttering ) reviewing the teenage culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, especially the inevitable school dance and the also equally inevitable trauma of the last dance. That event, the last dance that is, was the last chance for even shy boys like me to prove that we were not wallflowers, or worst. The last chance to rise (or fall) in the torrid and relentless pecking order of the social scene at school.
And moreover to prove to that certain she that you were made of some sort of heroic stuff, the stuff of dreams, of her dreams, thank you very much. Moreover, to make use of that social capital you invested in by learning to dance (at one Miss Wyatt’s, on the sly, unknown on the other side town, on frosty Saturday mornings, ah love’s youth), or the “shadow” of learning to dance (don’t blame tyrant Miss Wyatt for born two left feet, or close to it).
The following is one such episode in that old time, eternal saga.
There were two phases to the old school days dance scene, the high school one when we had all learned, or should have learned, the ropes enough not to be too foolish or too out of line on that social occasion, not if we expected to get a tussle from that certain she or he and the middle school one (formerly known as junior high school, and rightly so, but we will use the current usage here on the off chance that someone who only knows the term middle school is reading this). One could draw a sharp distinction between the two based on such factors as age, the more convoluted nature of social relationships, physical and sexual growth, changes in musical taste, attitudes toward life and toward the opposite sex (and, nowadays, same sex) all made them perfectly obvious as two distinct affairs. Except the additional ubiquitous teacher chaperones to guard against all manner of murder and mayhem, or more likely, someone sneaking out for butts, booze or a little off-hand nuzzling (or mercy, all three) at high school dances. Then. I will keep strictly to the “hot” middle school dance scene here.
In a sense the middle school scene is just an earlier version of the high school dance. No, stop, what am I talking about, hell, there is no question that the high school dance was a picnic to detail in comparison. We were light years ahead by then. At the middle school dance we were just wet-behind-the- ears (boy and girls alike, although I think the girls were a little ahead of us, or at least we boys liked the idea that they were).
Here though is what I gathered from a fellow middle school-er, Francis J. Murphy, “Frankie,” my best friend in those tormented years, when he heard that the big school dance was coming up in the spring (of, ouch, 1959) .
He merely went into denial, denial that he could care about such a “bourgeois” event (not his word, what would we know of bourgeois, or working class either, although the latter was what we were, stuff then better left to Mister Karl Marx and associates, but the idea was there). Such a “square” event (his word, although he was probably clueless about what was square and hip in those days) and that he planned to be “out of town” that day. Ya, like he was the President on important business of state.
But here is the funny thing, a few weeks before the big event, as most of his classmates started to get lined up for, and behind the spirit of, this thing he started making noises about being free, maybe, or that he might be able to free up time that day to fit the dance into his schedule. Probably just a snafu of some sort with his appointment secretary previously, I assume. See, here is what he, and every not-nerd, non-dweeb, heck, just breathing young male and female knew, this event would permanently solidify, solidify like stone, the social order of the school, in or out, no questions asked, no prisoners taken. So he too “knew” that signing that world peace treaty that he seemed to be on the verge of signing rather than attend the dance was nothing compared to being in the fight, the furious fight, to gain leverage in the upper echelons of the school pecking order.
All fair enough, all true enough, if only a rather short sketch of the preparations leading up to the preparations, the seemingly endless preparations for the ‘big night.’ A night that included getting into some serious grooming workouts, including procedures not usually included in the daily toilet. Plenty of deodorant, hair oil, and breathe fresheners. Moreover, endless energy used getting worked up about wardrobe, mode of transportation, and other factors that I have addressed elsewhere, and, additionally, factors contingent upon whether you were dated up or stag. All that need not be repeated here.
Damn, whatever physical description I could conger up would be just so much eye wash anyway. The thing could have been held in an airplane hangar and we all could have been wearing paper bags for all we really cared. What mattered, and maybe will always matter, is the hes looking at those certain shes, and visa-versa. The endless, small, meaningful looks (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) except for those wallflowers who were permanently looking down at the ground (and maybe still are). And that is the real struggle that went on in those events, for the stags.
The struggle against wallflower-dom. The struggle for at least some room in the social standing, even if near the bottom, rather than outcaste-dom. That struggle was as fierce as any class struggle old Karl Marx might have projected. The straight, upfront calculation (and not infrequently miscalculation), the maneuvering, the averting of eyes, the not averting of eyes, the reading of silence signals, the comprehended "no," the gratuitous "yes." Need I go on? I don’t think so, except, if you had the energy, or even if you didn’t, then you dragged yourself to that last dance. And hoped, hoped to high heaven, that it was a slow one.
Ah, memory. The last dance this night was a slow one. And that “cured” for the moment any angst suffered the last several days before the big night. And who did that fateful last dance save? Well that’s simple. Anyone who has been wounded in love’s young battles; anyone who has longed for that he or she to come through the door; anyone that has been on a date that did not work out, been stranded on a date that has not worked out; anyone who has had to submit to being pieced off with car hop drive-in food; anyone who has gotten a “Dear John” letter or its equivalent; anyone who has been jilted by that certain he or she; anyone who has been turned down for that last school dance from that certain he or she that you counted on to make your lame evening; anyone who has waited endlessly for the telephone to ring(now iPhone, etc., okay for the two people from the younger set who may read this)to hear that certain voice; and, especially those hes and she who have shed those midnight tears for youth's lost love. In short, everybody except those few “most popular “types who the rest of us will not shed one tear over, or the nerds who didn’t count (or care) anyway. The last dance song this night: The Dubs on the slow classic (and the one you prayed for to be that last dance) Could This Be Magic.
Monday, April 30, 2012
An Uncounted Causality Of War- The Never-Ending Vietnam War Story On The Anniversary Of The Fall Of Ho Chi Minh City 1975 (Then Saigon)
Markin comment:
THERE IS NO WALL IN WASHINGTON-BUT, MAYBE THERE SHOULD BE
This space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. Let me tell the tale.
Recently I returned, while on some unrelated business, to the neighborhood where I grew up. The neighborhood is one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950's, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. While there I happened upon an old neighbor who recognized me despite the fact that I had not seen her for at least thirty years. Since she had grown up and lived there continuously, taking over the family house, I inquired about the fate of various people that I had grown up with. She, as is usually the case in such circumstances, had a wealth of information but one story in particular cut me to the quick. I asked about a boy named Kenny who was a couple of years younger than I was but who I was very close to until my teenage years. Kenny used to tag along with my crowd until, as teenagers will do, we made it clear that he was no longer welcome being ‘too young’ to hang around with us older boys. Sound familiar?
The long and the short of it is that he found other friends of his own age to hang with, one in particular, from down the street named Jimmy. I had only a nodding acquaintance with both thereafter. As happened more often than not during the 1960’s in working class neighborhoods all over the country, especially with kids who were not academically inclined, when Jimmy came of age he faced the draft or the alternative of ‘volunteering’ for military service. He enlisted. Kenny for a number of valid medical reasons was 4-F (unqualified for military service). Of course, you know what is coming. Jimmy was sent to Vietnam where he was killed in 1968 at the age of 20. His name is one of the 58,000 plus that are etched on that Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington. His story ends there. Unfortunately, Kenny’s just begins.
Kenny took Jimmy’s death hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I make no pretense of having adequate knowledge about the causes of mental illnesses but someone I trust has told me that such a traumatic event as Jimmy’s death can trigger the condition in young adults. In any case, the institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.
Certainly not a happy story. Perhaps, aside from the specific details, not even an unusual one in modern times. Nevertheless I now count Kenny as one of the uncounted casualties of war. Along with those physically wounded soldiers who can back from Vietnam service unable to cope with their own demons and sought solace in drugs and alcohol. And those who for other reasons could no adjust and found themselves on the streets, in the half way shelters or the V. A. hospitals. And also those grieving parents and other loved ones whose lives were shattered and broken by the loss of their children. There is no wall in Washington for them. But, maybe there should be. As for poor Kenny from the old neighborhood. Rest in Peace.
THERE IS NO WALL IN WASHINGTON-BUT, MAYBE THERE SHOULD BE
This space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. Let me tell the tale.
Recently I returned, while on some unrelated business, to the neighborhood where I grew up. The neighborhood is one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950's, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. While there I happened upon an old neighbor who recognized me despite the fact that I had not seen her for at least thirty years. Since she had grown up and lived there continuously, taking over the family house, I inquired about the fate of various people that I had grown up with. She, as is usually the case in such circumstances, had a wealth of information but one story in particular cut me to the quick. I asked about a boy named Kenny who was a couple of years younger than I was but who I was very close to until my teenage years. Kenny used to tag along with my crowd until, as teenagers will do, we made it clear that he was no longer welcome being ‘too young’ to hang around with us older boys. Sound familiar?
The long and the short of it is that he found other friends of his own age to hang with, one in particular, from down the street named Jimmy. I had only a nodding acquaintance with both thereafter. As happened more often than not during the 1960’s in working class neighborhoods all over the country, especially with kids who were not academically inclined, when Jimmy came of age he faced the draft or the alternative of ‘volunteering’ for military service. He enlisted. Kenny for a number of valid medical reasons was 4-F (unqualified for military service). Of course, you know what is coming. Jimmy was sent to Vietnam where he was killed in 1968 at the age of 20. His name is one of the 58,000 plus that are etched on that Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington. His story ends there. Unfortunately, Kenny’s just begins.
Kenny took Jimmy’s death hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I make no pretense of having adequate knowledge about the causes of mental illnesses but someone I trust has told me that such a traumatic event as Jimmy’s death can trigger the condition in young adults. In any case, the institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.
Certainly not a happy story. Perhaps, aside from the specific details, not even an unusual one in modern times. Nevertheless I now count Kenny as one of the uncounted casualties of war. Along with those physically wounded soldiers who can back from Vietnam service unable to cope with their own demons and sought solace in drugs and alcohol. And those who for other reasons could no adjust and found themselves on the streets, in the half way shelters or the V. A. hospitals. And also those grieving parents and other loved ones whose lives were shattered and broken by the loss of their children. There is no wall in Washington for them. But, maybe there should be. As for poor Kenny from the old neighborhood. Rest in Peace.
Notes Of An Old Soldier-Greeting On May Day From The Boston Rally- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan –Ten Years Is Enough!
Remarks made at the Boston May Day Rally on May 1, 2012:
Sisters and Brothers, Hermanas y Hermanos, greetings on this glorious May Day, a day of international solidarity with the working people and oppressed of the world. Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with and defense of the just struggles of all people for political, social and economic justice in this wicked old world. And as witness our defenses of the encampments at Dewey Square in October and December of last year, and on a myriad other occasions, these are not just flowery words used on holiday occasions.
May Day is a very appropriate day to address the lessons of war and peace, lessons, as our organization’s name indicates, that have been dearly learned by war-hardened veterans on many of the battle fields of the 20th and 21st century. I want to tell you a secret, a secret though that I want you to spread far and wide. I do not give a damn about the Obama Adminstration’s timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. I say, no I cry out to high heaven- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries from Afghanistan. Ten years is enough!
And since this May Day is a day for actions I call on our sister and brother rank and file soldiers in Afghanistan, abandoned by the Obama administration to international expediency, to tell, no order, their commanders from that lowly platoon leader out in the boondocks to Commander-In Chief Obama to rev up the jeeps now, rev up the truck tranports now, rev up the transport planes now. All Troops Out Now! And when they get back here heal them! Enough of war! Thank you.
Sisters and Brothers, Hermanas y Hermanos, greetings on this glorious May Day, a day of international solidarity with the working people and oppressed of the world. Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with and defense of the just struggles of all people for political, social and economic justice in this wicked old world. And as witness our defenses of the encampments at Dewey Square in October and December of last year, and on a myriad other occasions, these are not just flowery words used on holiday occasions.
May Day is a very appropriate day to address the lessons of war and peace, lessons, as our organization’s name indicates, that have been dearly learned by war-hardened veterans on many of the battle fields of the 20th and 21st century. I want to tell you a secret, a secret though that I want you to spread far and wide. I do not give a damn about the Obama Adminstration’s timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. I say, no I cry out to high heaven- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries from Afghanistan. Ten years is enough!
And since this May Day is a day for actions I call on our sister and brother rank and file soldiers in Afghanistan, abandoned by the Obama administration to international expediency, to tell, no order, their commanders from that lowly platoon leader out in the boondocks to Commander-In Chief Obama to rev up the jeeps now, rev up the truck tranports now, rev up the transport planes now. All Troops Out Now! And when they get back here heal them! Enough of war! Thank you.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Yes, Got Them Born In The Alley, Raised Up In The Slums Blues- Barrelhouse Mamas- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Lucille Bogan performing her barrelhouse blues classic They Ain’t Walking No More.
CD Review
Barrelhouse Mamas: Born in the Alley, Raised Up In The Slums: Classic Piano Rags, Blues and Stomps from the 1920s and 30s, Yazoo Records, 1999
Recently I made a point in another CD review that dealt with some favorite blues torch singers that although it was mainly male blues singers (Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and the like) who were “discovered “during the 1960s folk revival minute back in the day, back in the 1920s and 30s day, the most well-known blues singers were female. One only needs to think of names like Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie, none of who are on this CD under review, Barrelhouse Mamas: Born In The Alley, Raised Up In The Slums: Classic Piano Rags, Blues, and Stomps from the 1920s and 30s, to get the point. Of course the above-mentioned names were the stars, the ones who achieved blues immortality and who drew down some serious dough performing for black audiences (mainly) in concert halls, movie theaters and any hall that was ready to roll, north and south, although mainly south in the then heartland of the American black population.
Naturally like any genre not everybody made it to the top, not even close in some cases. Not for lack of talent, but maybe being in the wrong place at the wrong time or maybe just because they liked working the off-beat milieu. With few exceptions the ‘barrelhouse mamas” here came up the hard way, made a small mark and faded back in obscurity once the blues (and jazz) craze died down with the advent of the Great Depression in the 1930s when spare nickels were not to be used for anything but survival.
The top tier performers here include a few songs by Lucille Bogan, a couple by Margaret Thornton including her Jockey Blues, and a couple by Saint Louis Bessie (not the famous Bessie Smith), including He Treats Me Like A Dog. Mainly these are songs that would resonate with their juke joint-style audiences, songs of no good, mean, always leaving, always two-timing, mistreatin’ men, no enough dough, not enough liquor, no way out of the slums and no way out of dire poverty (except maybe turning “tricks” on those mean streets). This is real slice of life down at the base of American society stuff not that far removed from today’s story line. As always with a Yazoo CD compilation there is an extremely informative booklet detailing the known information about these hard-pressed women.
CD Review
Barrelhouse Mamas: Born in the Alley, Raised Up In The Slums: Classic Piano Rags, Blues and Stomps from the 1920s and 30s, Yazoo Records, 1999
Recently I made a point in another CD review that dealt with some favorite blues torch singers that although it was mainly male blues singers (Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and the like) who were “discovered “during the 1960s folk revival minute back in the day, back in the 1920s and 30s day, the most well-known blues singers were female. One only needs to think of names like Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie, none of who are on this CD under review, Barrelhouse Mamas: Born In The Alley, Raised Up In The Slums: Classic Piano Rags, Blues, and Stomps from the 1920s and 30s, to get the point. Of course the above-mentioned names were the stars, the ones who achieved blues immortality and who drew down some serious dough performing for black audiences (mainly) in concert halls, movie theaters and any hall that was ready to roll, north and south, although mainly south in the then heartland of the American black population.
Naturally like any genre not everybody made it to the top, not even close in some cases. Not for lack of talent, but maybe being in the wrong place at the wrong time or maybe just because they liked working the off-beat milieu. With few exceptions the ‘barrelhouse mamas” here came up the hard way, made a small mark and faded back in obscurity once the blues (and jazz) craze died down with the advent of the Great Depression in the 1930s when spare nickels were not to be used for anything but survival.
The top tier performers here include a few songs by Lucille Bogan, a couple by Margaret Thornton including her Jockey Blues, and a couple by Saint Louis Bessie (not the famous Bessie Smith), including He Treats Me Like A Dog. Mainly these are songs that would resonate with their juke joint-style audiences, songs of no good, mean, always leaving, always two-timing, mistreatin’ men, no enough dough, not enough liquor, no way out of the slums and no way out of dire poverty (except maybe turning “tricks” on those mean streets). This is real slice of life down at the base of American society stuff not that far removed from today’s story line. As always with a Yazoo CD compilation there is an extremely informative booklet detailing the known information about these hard-pressed women.
Out In The Torch Singer Be-Bop Blues Night- Blues Masters- The Women Hold Forth- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Billie Holiday holding forth, very holding forth on Stormy Blues.
Blues Masters: Classic Blues Women: Volume 11, various artists, Rhino Records, 1993
I swear, I swear on a stack of seven bibles, I am off, finally off film noir femme fatales after watching (or rather , re-watching) Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, mainly Jane Greer, go round and round in the classic crime noir Out Of The Past. How could any rational man not think twice about following such femmes as Jane Greer’s Kathy who just happened to be a little gun happy (and a chronic liar to boot) who put a couple in Robert Mitchum’s Jeff after he did somersaults to try to save her bacon about six times. That’s gratitude for you.
Well, like I said I am off, done, finished with those two-timing dames, and good riddance. Now I have time, plenty of time, and my health to speak of blues in the night wailing female torch singers who, as far as I know, do not carry or do not need to carry guns, to do their business. Of course it was not big deal to change my allegiances because since I was a kid I have been nothing but putty in their hands for any torch singer who could throw away my blues with some sorrow laden tune.
Maybe it was in some back-drop Harvard Square coffeehouse in long mist time 1960s when I first heard such voices, first among them, Billie Holiday, late, early, whatever Billie Holiday singing of some man on her mind, mostly some no good man, some no dough man, who maybe took a couple of whacks at her for no reason, or just took her last dough to bet on that next sure thing…and happiness. Or maybe earlier when some home background 1940s we-won-the-war be-bop music filtered through the air my own childhood house from the local radio station playing Peggy Lee all Benny Goodman’d up, or Helen Whiting, or, or well, you get the drift. Stuff that would stop me in my tracks and ask, ask where did that sorrow come from.
Later, several years later, it blossomed fully when some now half-forgotten (but only half-forgotten) girlfriend gave me a complete Vanguard Record set of all of Bessie Smith’s recordings. Ah heaven, and ah the student neighbors who had to listen for half a day while I played the damn set through. So get it, get it straight I am a long-time aficionado of the genre and commenting on this Blues Masters CD about classic women blues singers is a piece of cake.
Strangely, although the bulk of the “discovered” blues singers of the folk revival minute of the 1960s were male (Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James, et. al) back in the serious heyday of the blues in the 1920s and early 1930s women dominated the blues market, the popular music of the day. And the women featured in this compilation were the most well-known of the myriad torch singers that lit up the concert hall, speakeasies and juke joints North and South. Mamie Smith, “Ma” Rainey, the divide Sippie Wallace, of course Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey (later to be one of the first women blues producers and record company owners), and Alberta Hunter are all rightfully and righteously here.
What, no Billie Holiday? Well yes she does Stormy Weather here so stay calm. I have singled her out because to me her voice, her phrasing, her half breath between notes is what torch singing was all about and all about whenever I felt (or feel) blue I just turned to Billie and she would sing your blues away (unfortunately not her own). Now if I could just get a torch singer who was also a non-gun- toting femme fatale I would be in very heaven. Ya, I know I said I was off femmes but what are you going to do.
Blues Masters: Classic Blues Women: Volume 11, various artists, Rhino Records, 1993
I swear, I swear on a stack of seven bibles, I am off, finally off film noir femme fatales after watching (or rather , re-watching) Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, mainly Jane Greer, go round and round in the classic crime noir Out Of The Past. How could any rational man not think twice about following such femmes as Jane Greer’s Kathy who just happened to be a little gun happy (and a chronic liar to boot) who put a couple in Robert Mitchum’s Jeff after he did somersaults to try to save her bacon about six times. That’s gratitude for you.
Well, like I said I am off, done, finished with those two-timing dames, and good riddance. Now I have time, plenty of time, and my health to speak of blues in the night wailing female torch singers who, as far as I know, do not carry or do not need to carry guns, to do their business. Of course it was not big deal to change my allegiances because since I was a kid I have been nothing but putty in their hands for any torch singer who could throw away my blues with some sorrow laden tune.
Maybe it was in some back-drop Harvard Square coffeehouse in long mist time 1960s when I first heard such voices, first among them, Billie Holiday, late, early, whatever Billie Holiday singing of some man on her mind, mostly some no good man, some no dough man, who maybe took a couple of whacks at her for no reason, or just took her last dough to bet on that next sure thing…and happiness. Or maybe earlier when some home background 1940s we-won-the-war be-bop music filtered through the air my own childhood house from the local radio station playing Peggy Lee all Benny Goodman’d up, or Helen Whiting, or, or well, you get the drift. Stuff that would stop me in my tracks and ask, ask where did that sorrow come from.
Later, several years later, it blossomed fully when some now half-forgotten (but only half-forgotten) girlfriend gave me a complete Vanguard Record set of all of Bessie Smith’s recordings. Ah heaven, and ah the student neighbors who had to listen for half a day while I played the damn set through. So get it, get it straight I am a long-time aficionado of the genre and commenting on this Blues Masters CD about classic women blues singers is a piece of cake.
Strangely, although the bulk of the “discovered” blues singers of the folk revival minute of the 1960s were male (Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James, et. al) back in the serious heyday of the blues in the 1920s and early 1930s women dominated the blues market, the popular music of the day. And the women featured in this compilation were the most well-known of the myriad torch singers that lit up the concert hall, speakeasies and juke joints North and South. Mamie Smith, “Ma” Rainey, the divide Sippie Wallace, of course Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey (later to be one of the first women blues producers and record company owners), and Alberta Hunter are all rightfully and righteously here.
What, no Billie Holiday? Well yes she does Stormy Weather here so stay calm. I have singled her out because to me her voice, her phrasing, her half breath between notes is what torch singing was all about and all about whenever I felt (or feel) blue I just turned to Billie and she would sing your blues away (unfortunately not her own). Now if I could just get a torch singer who was also a non-gun- toting femme fatale I would be in very heaven. Ya, I know I said I was off femmes but what are you going to do.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
As We Head Into Another Dead-End American Presidential Election Season (2012 version)- Once Again, Out In The Be-Bop Night-See Jack Run- The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Elections of 1960, A 50th Anniversary, Of Sorts
Click on the headline to link to a Huffington Post entry on the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's victory in the 1960 American Presidential Elections.
Markin comment:
A couple of years back (2010) I mentioned, in an entry that amounted to a nostalgic 1960s Boston kid time trip down political memory lane, the following that linked into this entry posted under the sign of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s presidential election victory election over one Richard Milhous Nixon, the arch-political villain of the age, my political coming of age:
“During the course of the afternoon that event [President Barack Obama had come to Massachusetts to campaign for the re-election of sitting Democratic Governor Patrick at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston], and the particular locale where it was staged, brought back a flood of memories of my first serious organized political actions in 1960 when, as a lad of fourteen, I set out to “save the world.” And my soul, or so I thought at the time, as well. That was the campaign of one of our own, Jack Kennedy, as he ran for president against the nefarious sitting Vice President, one Richard Milhous Nixon. In the course of that long ago campaign he gave one of his most stirring speeches not far from where I stood on this Saturday.
Although gathering troops (read: high school and college students) for that speech was not my first public political action of that year, a small SANE-sponsored demonstration against nuclear proliferation further up the same street was but I did not help to organize that one, the Kennedy campaign was the first one that hinted that I might, against all good sense, become a serious political junkie. Ya, I know, every mother warns their sons (then and now) and daughters (now) against such foolhardiness but what can you do. And, mercifully, I am still at it. And have wound up on the right side of the angels, to boot.
The funny thing about those triggered remembrances is that as far removed from bourgeois politics as I have been for about the last forty years I noticed many young politicos doing their youthful thing just as I did back then; passing out leaflets, holding banners, rousing the crowd, making extemporaneous little soapbox speeches, arguing with an occasional right wing Tea Party advocate, and making themselves hoarse in the process. In short, exhibiting all the skills (except the techno-savvy computer indoor stuff you do these days before such rallies) of a street organizer from any age, including communist street organizers. Now if those young organizers only had the extra-parliamentary left-wing politics to merge with those organizational skills. In short, come over to the side of the angels.
But that is where we come back to old Jack Kennedy and that 1960 campaign. Who would have thought that a kid, me, who started out walking door to door stuffing Jack Kennedy literature in every available door in 1960 but who turned off that road long ago would be saying thanks, Jack. Thanks for teaching me those political skills.”
And not just that thanks for heralding the break-out, or at least the attempted break-out of my 1960s generation from the Eisenhower-Nixon cold war death trap. See, at the time of the great attempted break-out from the confines of bourgeois society and the tracked career path all kinds of people seemed like they could be allies, and Jack Kennedy seemed a kindred spirit. I will not even mention Bobby, that one still brings a little tear to my eye. But enough of nostalgia we still have to fight to seek that newer world, to hear that high white note before everything comes crashing down on us.
*******
Below is an American Left History blog entry, dated, Thursday, August 23, 2007, entitled ON COMING OF POLITICAL AGE-Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers to give a little flavor to the above commentary.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
ON COMING OF POLITICAL AGE-Norman Mailer's "The Presidential Papers"
Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary for American writer Norman Mailer article, dated November 10, 2007.
COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW
THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS, NORMAN MAILER, VIKING, 1963
At one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon.
With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1960 political campaign-the one that pitted John F. Kennedy against Richard M. Nixon- that is the center of the book under review. There are other essays in this work, some of merely passing topical value, but what remains of interest today is a very perceptive analysis of the forces at work in that pivotal election. Theodore White won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960. Mailer in a few pithy articles gave the overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America of that time.
Needless to say the Kennedy victory of that year has interest today mainly for the forces that it unleashed in the base of society, especially, but not exclusively, among the youth. His rather conventional bourgeois Cold War foreign policy and haphazard domestic politics never transcended those of the New and Fair Deals of Roosevelt and Truman but his style, his youth and his élan seemingly gave the go ahead to all sorts of projects in order to ‘‘seek a newer world.” And we took him up on this. This writer counted himself among those youth who saw the potential to change the world. We also knew that if the main villain of the age , one Richard Milhous Nixon, had been successful in 1960 as he graphically demonstrated when he later became president we would not be seeing any new world but the same old, same old.
I have been, by hook or by crook, interested in politics from an early age. Names like the Rosenbergs, Joseph McCarthy, Khrushchev and organizations like Americans for Democratic Action and the like were familiar to me if not fully understood then. I came of political age with the 1960 presidential campaign. Mailer addresses the malaise of American political life during the stodgy Eisenhower years that created the opening for change-and Kennedy and his superb organization happily rushed in. These chances, as a cursory perusal of the last 40 odd years of bourgeois presidential politics makes painfully clear, do not come often.
The funny thing is that during most of 1960 I was actually “Madly for Adlai,” that is I preferred Adlai Stevenson, the twice defeated previous Democratic candidate, but when the deal went down at the advanced age of 14 I walked door to door talking up Kennedy. Of course, in Massachusetts that was not a big deal but I still recall today that I had a very strong sense I did not want to be left out of the new age ‘aborning’. That, my friends, in a small way is the start of that slippery road to the ‘lesser evil’ practice that dominates American politics and a habit that took me a fairly long time to break.
Mailer has some very cutting, but true, remarks about the kind of people who populate the political milieu down at the base of bourgeois politics, those who make it to the political conventions. Except that today they are better dressed and more media savvy nothing has changed. Why? Bourgeois politics, not being based on any fidelity to program except as a throwaway, is all about winning (and fighting to keep on winning). This does not bring out the "better angels of our nature." For those old enough to remember that little spark of youth that urged us on to seek that "newer world" and for those too young to have acquired knowledge of anything but the myth Mailer’s little book makes for interesting and well-written reading.
Markin comment:
A couple of years back (2010) I mentioned, in an entry that amounted to a nostalgic 1960s Boston kid time trip down political memory lane, the following that linked into this entry posted under the sign of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s presidential election victory election over one Richard Milhous Nixon, the arch-political villain of the age, my political coming of age:
“During the course of the afternoon that event [President Barack Obama had come to Massachusetts to campaign for the re-election of sitting Democratic Governor Patrick at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston], and the particular locale where it was staged, brought back a flood of memories of my first serious organized political actions in 1960 when, as a lad of fourteen, I set out to “save the world.” And my soul, or so I thought at the time, as well. That was the campaign of one of our own, Jack Kennedy, as he ran for president against the nefarious sitting Vice President, one Richard Milhous Nixon. In the course of that long ago campaign he gave one of his most stirring speeches not far from where I stood on this Saturday.
Although gathering troops (read: high school and college students) for that speech was not my first public political action of that year, a small SANE-sponsored demonstration against nuclear proliferation further up the same street was but I did not help to organize that one, the Kennedy campaign was the first one that hinted that I might, against all good sense, become a serious political junkie. Ya, I know, every mother warns their sons (then and now) and daughters (now) against such foolhardiness but what can you do. And, mercifully, I am still at it. And have wound up on the right side of the angels, to boot.
The funny thing about those triggered remembrances is that as far removed from bourgeois politics as I have been for about the last forty years I noticed many young politicos doing their youthful thing just as I did back then; passing out leaflets, holding banners, rousing the crowd, making extemporaneous little soapbox speeches, arguing with an occasional right wing Tea Party advocate, and making themselves hoarse in the process. In short, exhibiting all the skills (except the techno-savvy computer indoor stuff you do these days before such rallies) of a street organizer from any age, including communist street organizers. Now if those young organizers only had the extra-parliamentary left-wing politics to merge with those organizational skills. In short, come over to the side of the angels.
But that is where we come back to old Jack Kennedy and that 1960 campaign. Who would have thought that a kid, me, who started out walking door to door stuffing Jack Kennedy literature in every available door in 1960 but who turned off that road long ago would be saying thanks, Jack. Thanks for teaching me those political skills.”
And not just that thanks for heralding the break-out, or at least the attempted break-out of my 1960s generation from the Eisenhower-Nixon cold war death trap. See, at the time of the great attempted break-out from the confines of bourgeois society and the tracked career path all kinds of people seemed like they could be allies, and Jack Kennedy seemed a kindred spirit. I will not even mention Bobby, that one still brings a little tear to my eye. But enough of nostalgia we still have to fight to seek that newer world, to hear that high white note before everything comes crashing down on us.
*******
Below is an American Left History blog entry, dated, Thursday, August 23, 2007, entitled ON COMING OF POLITICAL AGE-Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers to give a little flavor to the above commentary.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
ON COMING OF POLITICAL AGE-Norman Mailer's "The Presidential Papers"
Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary for American writer Norman Mailer article, dated November 10, 2007.
COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW
THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS, NORMAN MAILER, VIKING, 1963
At one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon.
With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1960 political campaign-the one that pitted John F. Kennedy against Richard M. Nixon- that is the center of the book under review. There are other essays in this work, some of merely passing topical value, but what remains of interest today is a very perceptive analysis of the forces at work in that pivotal election. Theodore White won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960. Mailer in a few pithy articles gave the overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America of that time.
Needless to say the Kennedy victory of that year has interest today mainly for the forces that it unleashed in the base of society, especially, but not exclusively, among the youth. His rather conventional bourgeois Cold War foreign policy and haphazard domestic politics never transcended those of the New and Fair Deals of Roosevelt and Truman but his style, his youth and his élan seemingly gave the go ahead to all sorts of projects in order to ‘‘seek a newer world.” And we took him up on this. This writer counted himself among those youth who saw the potential to change the world. We also knew that if the main villain of the age , one Richard Milhous Nixon, had been successful in 1960 as he graphically demonstrated when he later became president we would not be seeing any new world but the same old, same old.
I have been, by hook or by crook, interested in politics from an early age. Names like the Rosenbergs, Joseph McCarthy, Khrushchev and organizations like Americans for Democratic Action and the like were familiar to me if not fully understood then. I came of political age with the 1960 presidential campaign. Mailer addresses the malaise of American political life during the stodgy Eisenhower years that created the opening for change-and Kennedy and his superb organization happily rushed in. These chances, as a cursory perusal of the last 40 odd years of bourgeois presidential politics makes painfully clear, do not come often.
The funny thing is that during most of 1960 I was actually “Madly for Adlai,” that is I preferred Adlai Stevenson, the twice defeated previous Democratic candidate, but when the deal went down at the advanced age of 14 I walked door to door talking up Kennedy. Of course, in Massachusetts that was not a big deal but I still recall today that I had a very strong sense I did not want to be left out of the new age ‘aborning’. That, my friends, in a small way is the start of that slippery road to the ‘lesser evil’ practice that dominates American politics and a habit that took me a fairly long time to break.
Mailer has some very cutting, but true, remarks about the kind of people who populate the political milieu down at the base of bourgeois politics, those who make it to the political conventions. Except that today they are better dressed and more media savvy nothing has changed. Why? Bourgeois politics, not being based on any fidelity to program except as a throwaway, is all about winning (and fighting to keep on winning). This does not bring out the "better angels of our nature." For those old enough to remember that little spark of youth that urged us on to seek that "newer world" and for those too young to have acquired knowledge of anything but the myth Mailer’s little book makes for interesting and well-written reading.
Friday, April 27, 2012
We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning- A Petiton For His Freedom
We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning- A Petiton For His Freedom
http://www.bradleymanning.org
Markin comment:
Usually I can take sending petitions "begging" various American imperial governmental authorites to do some right thing with a grain of political salt. Okay to do but get out on the streets and organize like hell. On this petition for Bradley Manning I will sign with both hands, and gladly.
********
We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our fax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad...
We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
A 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead wece two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries"—tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are j'ust as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
The Undersigned,
FIRST NAME
LAST NAME
MAILING ADDRESS
CITY /TOWN
STATE
ZIP
EMAIL
PHONE
PLEASE CHECK IF APPLICABLE:
a INTERESTED IN VOLUNTEERING
a DO NOT PUBLISH NAME AND CITY
Please return to:
Bradley Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist,
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
This letter will be mailed on your behalf to both Mr. John McHugh and Gen. Casey at the Pentagon.
Bradley Manning Support Network www.bradleymanning.org
http://www.bradleymanning.org
Markin comment:
Usually I can take sending petitions "begging" various American imperial governmental authorites to do some right thing with a grain of political salt. Okay to do but get out on the streets and organize like hell. On this petition for Bradley Manning I will sign with both hands, and gladly.
********
We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our fax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad...
We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
A 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead wece two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries"—tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are j'ust as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
The Undersigned,
FIRST NAME
LAST NAME
MAILING ADDRESS
CITY /TOWN
STATE
ZIP
PHONE
PLEASE CHECK IF APPLICABLE:
a INTERESTED IN VOLUNTEERING
a DO NOT PUBLISH NAME AND CITY
Please return to:
Bradley Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist,
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
This letter will be mailed on your behalf to both Mr. John McHugh and Gen. Casey at the Pentagon.
Bradley Manning Support Network www.bradleymanning.org
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Night- Thanksgiving Football Rally, 1963
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American football on Thanksgiving. I knew when I Googled this search old Wikipedia would not let me down.
Peter Paul Markin, Class of 1964, comment:
Scene: Around and inside the old high school gym entrance on the Hamilton Street side the night before the big Thanksgiving Day football game against our cross town arch-rival, Adamsville High School, in 1963. (Yes, that above-mentioned street for the forgetful is the one that had the Merit gas station, now Hess, on the corner. The place where every self-respecting be-bop high school guy “filled up,” his “boss” car, or his father’s on Friday or Saturday night, cheaply, so that he had enough dough to “spurge” at the end of that “hot date” night for burgers, fries and tonic, you remember soda, at Adventure Car Hop down on the Southern Artery.)
This ancient 1963 time, for the younger reader, was a time before they built what is apparently an addition, including a newer gym and cafeteria, modeled on the office buildings across the street from the school behind the MBTA stop and a tribute to “high” concrete construction, and lowest bidder imagination. But this could have been a scene from any one of a number of years in those days. And I am willing to bet six-two-and-even with cold hard cash gathered from my local ATM against all takers that this story “speaks,” except for the names, to what is up today at Thanksgiving football rally time as well:
Sure the air was cold, you could see your breath making curls before your eyes no problem, and the night felt cold, cold as one would expect from a late November New England night. It was also starless, as the weather report had projected rain for the big game. Damn, not, damn, because I was worried about, or cared about a little rain. I’ve seen and done many things in a late November New England winter rain, and December and January rains too, for that matter. No, this damn, is for the possibility that the muddy Veterans Stadium field would slow up our vaunted offensive attack. And good as it is a little rain, and a little mud, could prove to be a great equalizer.
This after all was class struggle. No, not the kind that you might have heard old Karl Marx and his boys talk about, although now that I think of it there might be something to that here as well. I’ll have to check that out sometime but right then I was worried, worried to perdition, about the battle of the titans on the gridiron, rain-soaked granite grey day or not. See, this particular class struggle was Class A Adamsville against Class B North Adamsville and we needed every advantage against this bigger school. (Yes, I know for those younger readers that today’s Massachusetts high schools are gathered in a bewildering number of divisions and sub-divisions for some purpose that escapes me but when football was played for keeps and honor simpler alphabetic designations worked just find.)
Do I have to describe the physical aspects of the gym? Come on now this thing was (is) any high school gym, any public high school gym, anywhere. Foldaway bleachers, foldaway divider (to separate boys for girls in gym class back in the day, if you can believe that), waxed and polished floors made of sturdy wood, don’t ask me what kind (oak, I guess) with various sets of lines for its other uses as a basketball or volleyball court. But enough of paid by the word stuff to add color to this sketch. The important thing was that guys and gals, old and young, students and alumni and just plan townies were milling about waiting for the annual gathering of the Red Raider clan, those who have bled, bleed or want to bleed Raider red and even those oddballs that don't. This one stirs the blood of even the most detached denizen of the old town.
This night of nights, moreover, every unattached red-blooded boy student, in addition to his heavy dose of school patriotism and wishful wishing that he had been just a little stronger, faster or agile to have made the team, was looking around, and looking around frantically in some cases, to see if that certain she has come for the festivities. And every unattached red-blooded girl student was searching for that certain he (and maybe wishing that just that moment the one she was interested in has been just a little stronger, faster or agile so she could bask in his reflected glory). Don’t tell me, boy or girl, agile or not, you didn’t take a peek, or at least a stealthy glance.
Among this throng of peekers, half-peekers and wannabe peekers were a couple of fervent not fast enough, strong enough, agile enough quasi-jock male students, one of them is writing this entry, the other the great long distance track man, Josh Breslin, was busy getting in his glances. Both were (are) members of the Class of 1964 who with a vested interest in seeing their football-playing fellow classmates pummel the cross town rival, and also, in the interest of full disclosure, are deeply emerged in the hunt for those elusive shes. I do not see the certain she that I am looking for but, as was my style then, I have taken a couple of stealthy glances at some alternate prospects. (This led, on more than one occasion, including one “oh, damn” occasion, to have a very special she accuse me of perfidy, although she did not use that word, and dismissed me, words she did use, out of hand).
This was the final football game of our final football-watching season, as students anyway, as well so we had brought extra energy to the night’s performance. We were on the prowl and ready to do everything in our power to bring home victory…, well, almost everything except donning a football uniform to face the monstrous goliaths of the gridiron. We fancied ourselves built for more "refined" pursuits like those just mentioned stealthy glances, perfidious or not, and the like.
Finally, after much hubbub (and more coy and meaningful looks all around the place than one could reasonably shake a stick at) the rally began, at first somewhat subdued due to the then very recent trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the dastardly murder of one of our own, for the many green-tinged Irish partisans among the crowd, as well as the president. But everyone, seemingly, had tacitly agreed for this little window of time that the outside world and its horrors would not intrude. A few obligatory (and forgettable) speeches by somber and lackluster school administrators, headed by Principal Kelley, and their lackeys in student government and among the faculty stressing good sportsmanship and that old chestnut about it not mattering about victory but how you play the game drone away.
Of course, no self-respecting “true” Red Raider had (has) anything but thoughts of mayhem and casting the cross-town rivals to the gates of hell in his or her heart so this speechifying was so much wasted wind. This “bummer,” obligatory or not, was followed with a little of this and that, mainly side show antics. People, amateurishly, twirling red and black things in the air, and the like. Boosters or Tri-Hi-Yi types, somebody’s girlfriend or some important alum’s daughter for all I knew. Certainly not in a league with the majorettes, who I will not hear a word against, and who certainly know how to twirl the right way. See, I was saving one of my sly, coy and not perfidious glances for one of them right then.
What every red-blooded senior boy, moreover, and probably others as well, was looking forward to get things moving though was the cheer-leading, led by the senior girls like the vivacious Roxanne Murphy ( who, if you can believe this, dismissed me out of hand, although not for perfidiousness( ouch), the spunky Josie McCarthy, and the plucky Linda Kelly. And when they hit center court they did not fail us with their flips, dips, and rah-rahs. Strangely, the band and its bevy of majorettes when it is their turn, with one noted exception, did not inspire that same kind of devotion, although no one can deny that some of those girls can twirl.
But this entire spectacle was so much, too much, introduction. For what was wanted, what was demanded of the situation, up close and personal, was a view of the Goliaths that will run over the cross town arch-rival the next day. A chance to yell ourselves silly. The season had been excellent, marred only by a bitter lost to a bigger area team on their home field, and our team was highly regarded by lukewarm fans and sports nuts alike. Naturally, in the spirit, if not the letter of high school athletic ethos, the back-ups and non-seniors were introduced by Coach Leahy. Then came the drum roll of the senior starters, some of whom have been playing for an eternity it seems. Names like Tom Kiley, Walt Simmons, Lee Munson, Paul Duchamp, Joe Zona, Don McNally, Jim Fallon, Charlie McDonald, Stevie Chase, "Woj" (Jesus, don’t forget to include him. I don't need that kind of madness coming down on my face, even now.) and on and on.
Oh, yes and “Bullwinkle”, Bill Curran, a behemoth of a run-over fullback, even by today’s standards. Yes, let him loose on that arch-rival's defense. Whoa. But something was missing. A sullen collective pout filled the room. After the intros were over the restless crowd needed an oral reassurance from their warriors that the enemy was done for. And as he ambled up to the microphone and said just a couple of words we get just that reassurance from “Bullwinkle” himself. That is all we need. Boys and girls, this one is in the bag. And as we head for the exits to dream our second-hand dreams of glory the band plays the school fight song to the tune of On Wisconsin. Yes, those were the days when boys and girls, young and old, wise or ignorance bled raider red in the old town. Do they still do so today? And do they still make those furtive glances? I hope so.
Peter Paul Markin, Class of 1964, comment:
Scene: Around and inside the old high school gym entrance on the Hamilton Street side the night before the big Thanksgiving Day football game against our cross town arch-rival, Adamsville High School, in 1963. (Yes, that above-mentioned street for the forgetful is the one that had the Merit gas station, now Hess, on the corner. The place where every self-respecting be-bop high school guy “filled up,” his “boss” car, or his father’s on Friday or Saturday night, cheaply, so that he had enough dough to “spurge” at the end of that “hot date” night for burgers, fries and tonic, you remember soda, at Adventure Car Hop down on the Southern Artery.)
This ancient 1963 time, for the younger reader, was a time before they built what is apparently an addition, including a newer gym and cafeteria, modeled on the office buildings across the street from the school behind the MBTA stop and a tribute to “high” concrete construction, and lowest bidder imagination. But this could have been a scene from any one of a number of years in those days. And I am willing to bet six-two-and-even with cold hard cash gathered from my local ATM against all takers that this story “speaks,” except for the names, to what is up today at Thanksgiving football rally time as well:
Sure the air was cold, you could see your breath making curls before your eyes no problem, and the night felt cold, cold as one would expect from a late November New England night. It was also starless, as the weather report had projected rain for the big game. Damn, not, damn, because I was worried about, or cared about a little rain. I’ve seen and done many things in a late November New England winter rain, and December and January rains too, for that matter. No, this damn, is for the possibility that the muddy Veterans Stadium field would slow up our vaunted offensive attack. And good as it is a little rain, and a little mud, could prove to be a great equalizer.
This after all was class struggle. No, not the kind that you might have heard old Karl Marx and his boys talk about, although now that I think of it there might be something to that here as well. I’ll have to check that out sometime but right then I was worried, worried to perdition, about the battle of the titans on the gridiron, rain-soaked granite grey day or not. See, this particular class struggle was Class A Adamsville against Class B North Adamsville and we needed every advantage against this bigger school. (Yes, I know for those younger readers that today’s Massachusetts high schools are gathered in a bewildering number of divisions and sub-divisions for some purpose that escapes me but when football was played for keeps and honor simpler alphabetic designations worked just find.)
Do I have to describe the physical aspects of the gym? Come on now this thing was (is) any high school gym, any public high school gym, anywhere. Foldaway bleachers, foldaway divider (to separate boys for girls in gym class back in the day, if you can believe that), waxed and polished floors made of sturdy wood, don’t ask me what kind (oak, I guess) with various sets of lines for its other uses as a basketball or volleyball court. But enough of paid by the word stuff to add color to this sketch. The important thing was that guys and gals, old and young, students and alumni and just plan townies were milling about waiting for the annual gathering of the Red Raider clan, those who have bled, bleed or want to bleed Raider red and even those oddballs that don't. This one stirs the blood of even the most detached denizen of the old town.
This night of nights, moreover, every unattached red-blooded boy student, in addition to his heavy dose of school patriotism and wishful wishing that he had been just a little stronger, faster or agile to have made the team, was looking around, and looking around frantically in some cases, to see if that certain she has come for the festivities. And every unattached red-blooded girl student was searching for that certain he (and maybe wishing that just that moment the one she was interested in has been just a little stronger, faster or agile so she could bask in his reflected glory). Don’t tell me, boy or girl, agile or not, you didn’t take a peek, or at least a stealthy glance.
Among this throng of peekers, half-peekers and wannabe peekers were a couple of fervent not fast enough, strong enough, agile enough quasi-jock male students, one of them is writing this entry, the other the great long distance track man, Josh Breslin, was busy getting in his glances. Both were (are) members of the Class of 1964 who with a vested interest in seeing their football-playing fellow classmates pummel the cross town rival, and also, in the interest of full disclosure, are deeply emerged in the hunt for those elusive shes. I do not see the certain she that I am looking for but, as was my style then, I have taken a couple of stealthy glances at some alternate prospects. (This led, on more than one occasion, including one “oh, damn” occasion, to have a very special she accuse me of perfidy, although she did not use that word, and dismissed me, words she did use, out of hand).
This was the final football game of our final football-watching season, as students anyway, as well so we had brought extra energy to the night’s performance. We were on the prowl and ready to do everything in our power to bring home victory…, well, almost everything except donning a football uniform to face the monstrous goliaths of the gridiron. We fancied ourselves built for more "refined" pursuits like those just mentioned stealthy glances, perfidious or not, and the like.
Finally, after much hubbub (and more coy and meaningful looks all around the place than one could reasonably shake a stick at) the rally began, at first somewhat subdued due to the then very recent trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the dastardly murder of one of our own, for the many green-tinged Irish partisans among the crowd, as well as the president. But everyone, seemingly, had tacitly agreed for this little window of time that the outside world and its horrors would not intrude. A few obligatory (and forgettable) speeches by somber and lackluster school administrators, headed by Principal Kelley, and their lackeys in student government and among the faculty stressing good sportsmanship and that old chestnut about it not mattering about victory but how you play the game drone away.
Of course, no self-respecting “true” Red Raider had (has) anything but thoughts of mayhem and casting the cross-town rivals to the gates of hell in his or her heart so this speechifying was so much wasted wind. This “bummer,” obligatory or not, was followed with a little of this and that, mainly side show antics. People, amateurishly, twirling red and black things in the air, and the like. Boosters or Tri-Hi-Yi types, somebody’s girlfriend or some important alum’s daughter for all I knew. Certainly not in a league with the majorettes, who I will not hear a word against, and who certainly know how to twirl the right way. See, I was saving one of my sly, coy and not perfidious glances for one of them right then.
What every red-blooded senior boy, moreover, and probably others as well, was looking forward to get things moving though was the cheer-leading, led by the senior girls like the vivacious Roxanne Murphy ( who, if you can believe this, dismissed me out of hand, although not for perfidiousness( ouch), the spunky Josie McCarthy, and the plucky Linda Kelly. And when they hit center court they did not fail us with their flips, dips, and rah-rahs. Strangely, the band and its bevy of majorettes when it is their turn, with one noted exception, did not inspire that same kind of devotion, although no one can deny that some of those girls can twirl.
But this entire spectacle was so much, too much, introduction. For what was wanted, what was demanded of the situation, up close and personal, was a view of the Goliaths that will run over the cross town arch-rival the next day. A chance to yell ourselves silly. The season had been excellent, marred only by a bitter lost to a bigger area team on their home field, and our team was highly regarded by lukewarm fans and sports nuts alike. Naturally, in the spirit, if not the letter of high school athletic ethos, the back-ups and non-seniors were introduced by Coach Leahy. Then came the drum roll of the senior starters, some of whom have been playing for an eternity it seems. Names like Tom Kiley, Walt Simmons, Lee Munson, Paul Duchamp, Joe Zona, Don McNally, Jim Fallon, Charlie McDonald, Stevie Chase, "Woj" (Jesus, don’t forget to include him. I don't need that kind of madness coming down on my face, even now.) and on and on.
Oh, yes and “Bullwinkle”, Bill Curran, a behemoth of a run-over fullback, even by today’s standards. Yes, let him loose on that arch-rival's defense. Whoa. But something was missing. A sullen collective pout filled the room. After the intros were over the restless crowd needed an oral reassurance from their warriors that the enemy was done for. And as he ambled up to the microphone and said just a couple of words we get just that reassurance from “Bullwinkle” himself. That is all we need. Boys and girls, this one is in the bag. And as we head for the exits to dream our second-hand dreams of glory the band plays the school fight song to the tune of On Wisconsin. Yes, those were the days when boys and girls, young and old, wise or ignorance bled raider red in the old town. Do they still do so today? And do they still make those furtive glances? I hope so.
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston (And Everywhere)
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Hayes Bickford Breakout 1962
Click on the headline to link to a photograph of a Hayes-Bickford on Huntington Avenue in Boston (no Cambridge one available) to add a little flavor to this entry.
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Two: Got The Urge For Going In Search Of The Blue- Pink Great American West Night- Hayes-Bickford Breakout 1962
Here I am again sitting, 3 o’clock in the morning sitting, bleary-eyed, slightly distracted after mulling over the back and forth of the twelve hundredth run-in (nice way to put it, right?) with Ma that has driven me out into this chilly early October 1962 morning. And where do I find myself sitting at this time of morning? Tired, but excitedly expectant, on an uncomfortable, unpadded bench seat on this rolling old clickity-clack monster of a Red Line subway car as it now waggles its way out past Kendall Station on its way to Central Square and then to the end of the line, Harvard Square. My hangout, my muse home, my night home, at least my weekend night home, my place to make sense of the world in a world that doesn’t make much sense, at least not enough much sense. Sanctuary, Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford sanctuary, misbegotten teenage boy sanctuary, recognized by august international law, recognized by sanctified canon law, or not.
That beef with Ma, that really unnumbered beef, forget about the 1200 I said before, that was just a guess, has driven me to take an “all-nighter” trip away from the travails of the old home town across Boston to the never-closed Hayes-Bickford cafeteria that beckons just as you get up the stairs from the Harvard Square subway tunnel. Damn, let me just get this off my chest and then I can tell the rest of the story. Ma said X, I pleaded for Y (hell this homestead civil war lent itself righteously to a nice algebraic formulation. You can use it too, no charge). Unbeknownst to me Y did not exist in Ma’s universe. Ever. Sound familiar? Sure, but I had to get it off my chest.
After putting on my uniform, my Harvard Square “cool” uniform: over-sized flannel brownish plaid shirt, belt-less black cuff-less chino pants, black Chuck Taylor logo-ed Converse sneakers, a now ratty old windbreaker won in a Fourth of July distance race a few years back when I really was nothing but a wet-behind-the ears kid to ward off the chill, and, and the absolutely required midnight sunglasses to hide those bleary eyes from a peeking world I was ready to go. To face the unlighted night, and fight against the dawn’s rising for another day. Oh ya, I forgot, I had to sneak out of the house stealthily, run like some crazed broken- field football player down the back of the property, and, after catching my breathe, walk a couple of miles over the North Adamsville Bridge and nasty, hostile (hostile if anyone was out, and anyone was sniping for a misbegotten teenage boy, for any purpose good or evil) Dorchester streets to get to the Fields Corner subway stop. The local Eastern Mass. bus had stopped its always erratic service hours ago, and, anyway, I usually would rather walk, in any case, than wait, wait my youth away for those buses to amble along our way with their byzantine schedules.
Right now though I am thinking, as those subway car wheels rattle beneath my feet, who knows, really, how or why it starts, that wanderlust start, that strange feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have to move on, or out, or up or you will explode, except you also know, or you damn well come to know that it eats away at a man, or a woman for that matter, in different ways. Maybe way back, way back in the cradle it was that first sense that there was more to the world that the four corners of that baby world existence and that if you could just, could just get over that little, little side board there might be something better, much better over the horizon. But, frankly that just seems like too much of a literary stretch even for me, moody teenage boy that I am, to swallow so let’s just say that it started once I knew that the ocean was a way to get away, if you needed to get away. But see I didn’t figure than one out for myself even, old Kenny from the old neighborhood in third grade is the one who got me hip to that, and then Johnny James and his brother filled in the rest of the blanks and so then I was sea-worthy, dream sea-worthy anyway.
But, honestly, that sea dream stuff can only be music for the future because right now I am stuck, although I do not always feel stuck about it, trying to figure my way out of high school world, or at least figure out the raging things that I want to do after high school that fill up my daydream time (study hall time, if you really want to know). Of course, as well, that part about the ocean just mentioned, well there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my-back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that meant I had to head west. Right now west though is Harvard Square, its doings and not doings, it trumpet call to words, and sounds, and actions in the October Friday night all-night storm brewing.
The train now rounds the squeaky-sounding bend out of Central Square and stops at the underground Harvard Square station. So now I leave my pensive seat and stand waiting, waiting for the driver to release the pressure to let the sliding train door open, getting ready to jump off the old subway, two-step-at-a-time my way up the two flights of stairs and head for mecca to see if things jump for me tonight. The doors open at last. Up the two-stepped stairs I go, get to the surface and confront the old double-glassed Hayes door entrance and survey the vast table-filled room that at this hour has a few night owl stranglers spotted randomly throughout the place.
You know the old Hayes-Bickford, or one of them, if you live in Boston or New York City, or a few other places on the East Coast, don’t you? Put your tray on the metal slider (hey, I don’t know what you call that slider thing, okay) and cruise down the line from item to item behind the glass-enclosed bins of, mostly, steamy food, if you are looking for fast service, for a quick between doing things, pressing things, meal. Steamed and breaded everything from breakfast to lunch to dinner anytime topped off by dishwater quality coffee (refills on demand, if you feel lucky).
This is not the place to bring your date, certainly not your first date, except maybe for a quick cup of that coffee before going to some event, or home. What this is, really, is a place where you can hang out, and hang out with comfort, because nobody, nobody at all, is going to ask you to leave, at least if you act half-way human. And that is what this place is really about, the humans in all their human conditions doing human things, alien to you or not, that you see floating by you, as you take a seat at one of the one-size-fits all wooden tables with those red vinyl seat covered chairs replete with paper place settings, a few off-hand eating utensils and the usual obligatory array of condiments to help get down the food and drink offered here.
Let me describe who is here at this hour on an early Saturday morning in October 1962. I will not vouch for other times, or other days, but I know Friday and Saturday nights a little so I can say something about them. Of course there is the last drink at the last open barroom crowd, said bar already well-closed in blue law Massachusetts, trying to get sober enough by eating a little food to traverse the road home. Good luck. Needless to say eating food in an all-night cafeteria, any all-night cafeteria, means only one thing-the person is so caught up in a booze frenzy that he (mainly) or she (very occasionally) is desperate for anything to hang the name food on to. Frankly, except for the obligatory hard-dollar coffee-steamed to its essence, then through some mystical alchemic process re-beaned, and served in heavy ceramic mugs that keep in the warmth to keep the eyes open the food here is strictly for the, well, the desperate, drunk or sober.
I might mention a little more about the food as I go along but it is strictly to add color to this little story. Maybe, maybe it will add color to the story but this is mainly about the “literary” life at the old Hayes and the quest for the blue-pink night not the cuisine so don’t hold me to it. Here is the kicker though; there are a few, mercifully few this night, old winos, habitual drunks, and street vagabonds (I am being polite here) who are nuzzling their food, for real. This is the way that you can tell the "last drink" boys, the hail fellows well met, who are just out on the town and who probably go to one of the ten zillion colleges in the area and are drawn like moths (and like wayward high schools kids, including this writer) to the magic name, Harvard Square. They just pick at their food. Those other guys (again, mainly, guys) those habituals and professional waywards work at it like it is their last chance for salvation.
Harvard Square, bright lights, dead of nights, see the sights. That vision is nothing but a commercial, a commercial magnet for every young (and old) hustler within fifty miles of the place to come and display their “acumen”. Their hustle. Three card Monte, quick-change artistry, bait and hook, a little jack-rolling, fake dope-plying, lifting an off-hand wallet, the whole gamut of hustler con lore. On any given Harvard Square weekend night there have got to be more young, naïve, starry-eyed kids hanging out trying to be cool, but really, like me, just learning the ropes of life than you could shake a stick at to set a hustler’s heart, if he (mainly) or she (sometimes) had a heart.
I’ll tell you about a quick con that got me easy in a second but right now let me tell you that at this hour I can see a few con artists just now resting up after a hard night’s work around a couple of tables, comparing notes (or, more likely, trying to con each other, there is no honor among thieves in this little night world. Go to it boys). As to the con that got me, hey it was simple, a guy, an older guy, a twenty-five year old or something like that guy, came up to me while I was talking to a friend and said did I (we) want to get some booze. Sober, sixteen years old, and thrill-seeking I said sure (drinking booze is the coin of the realm for thrills these days, among high school kids that I know, maybe the older set, those college guys, are, I hear, experimenting with drugs but if so it is very on the QT).
He said name your poison, I did, and then he “suggested” a little something for himself. Sure, whatever is right. I gave him the money and he returned a few minutes later with a small bag with the top of a liquor bottle hanging out. He split. We went off to a private area around Harvard Yard (Phillips Brook House, I think) and got ready to have our first serious taste of booze, and maybe get rum brave enough to pick up some girls. Naturally, the bottle is a booze bottle alright but it had been opened (how long before is anyone’s guess) and filled with water. Sucker, right. Now the only reason that I am mentioning this story right now is that the guy who pulled this con is sitting, sitting like the King of Siam, just a few tables away from where I am sitting. The lesson learned for the road, for the future road that beckons: don’t accept packages from strangers without inspecting them and watch out for cons, right? No, hell no. The lesson is this: sure don’t fall for wise guy tricks but the big thing is to shake it off, forget about it if you see the con artist again. You are way to cool to let him (or occasionally her) think that they have conned you. Out loud, anyway.
But wait, I am not here at almost four o’clock in the Hayes-Bickford morning, the Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford morning, to talk about the decor, the food if that is what it is, about the clientele, humble, slick, or otherwise. I am here looking for “talent,” literary talent that is. See, I have been here enough, and have heard enough about the ”beats” (or rather pseudo-beats, or “late phase” beats at this time) and the “folkies” (music people breaking out of the Pop 40 music scene and going back to the roots of America music, way back) to know that a bunch of them, about six in all, right this minute are sitting in a far corner with a light drum tapping the beat listening to a guy in black pants(always de rigueur black), sneakers and a flannel shirt just like me reciting his latest poem. That possibility is what drove me here this night, and other nights as well. See the Hayes is known as the place where someone like Norman Mailer has his buttered toast after one of his “last drink” bouts. Or that Bob Dylan sat at that table, that table right over there, writing something on a napkin. Or some parallel poet to the one now wrapping up his seventy-seven verse imitation Allen Ginsberg's Howl master work went out to San Francisco and blew the lid off the town, the City Lights town, the literary town.
But I better, now that the five-ish dawn light is hovering after my dawdlings, trying to break through the night wars, get my droopy body down those subway stairs pretty soon and back across town before anyone at home notices that I am missing. Still I will take the hard-bitten coffee, re-beaned and all, I will take the sleepy eyes that are starting to weigh down my face, I will even take the con artists and feisty drunks just so that I can be here when somebody’s search for the blue-pink great American West night, farther west than Harvard Square night, gets launched.
The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.
Scene Two: Got The Urge For Going In Search Of The Blue- Pink Great American West Night- Hayes-Bickford Breakout 1962
Here I am again sitting, 3 o’clock in the morning sitting, bleary-eyed, slightly distracted after mulling over the back and forth of the twelve hundredth run-in (nice way to put it, right?) with Ma that has driven me out into this chilly early October 1962 morning. And where do I find myself sitting at this time of morning? Tired, but excitedly expectant, on an uncomfortable, unpadded bench seat on this rolling old clickity-clack monster of a Red Line subway car as it now waggles its way out past Kendall Station on its way to Central Square and then to the end of the line, Harvard Square. My hangout, my muse home, my night home, at least my weekend night home, my place to make sense of the world in a world that doesn’t make much sense, at least not enough much sense. Sanctuary, Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford sanctuary, misbegotten teenage boy sanctuary, recognized by august international law, recognized by sanctified canon law, or not.
That beef with Ma, that really unnumbered beef, forget about the 1200 I said before, that was just a guess, has driven me to take an “all-nighter” trip away from the travails of the old home town across Boston to the never-closed Hayes-Bickford cafeteria that beckons just as you get up the stairs from the Harvard Square subway tunnel. Damn, let me just get this off my chest and then I can tell the rest of the story. Ma said X, I pleaded for Y (hell this homestead civil war lent itself righteously to a nice algebraic formulation. You can use it too, no charge). Unbeknownst to me Y did not exist in Ma’s universe. Ever. Sound familiar? Sure, but I had to get it off my chest.
After putting on my uniform, my Harvard Square “cool” uniform: over-sized flannel brownish plaid shirt, belt-less black cuff-less chino pants, black Chuck Taylor logo-ed Converse sneakers, a now ratty old windbreaker won in a Fourth of July distance race a few years back when I really was nothing but a wet-behind-the ears kid to ward off the chill, and, and the absolutely required midnight sunglasses to hide those bleary eyes from a peeking world I was ready to go. To face the unlighted night, and fight against the dawn’s rising for another day. Oh ya, I forgot, I had to sneak out of the house stealthily, run like some crazed broken- field football player down the back of the property, and, after catching my breathe, walk a couple of miles over the North Adamsville Bridge and nasty, hostile (hostile if anyone was out, and anyone was sniping for a misbegotten teenage boy, for any purpose good or evil) Dorchester streets to get to the Fields Corner subway stop. The local Eastern Mass. bus had stopped its always erratic service hours ago, and, anyway, I usually would rather walk, in any case, than wait, wait my youth away for those buses to amble along our way with their byzantine schedules.
Right now though I am thinking, as those subway car wheels rattle beneath my feet, who knows, really, how or why it starts, that wanderlust start, that strange feeling in the pit of your stomach that you have to move on, or out, or up or you will explode, except you also know, or you damn well come to know that it eats away at a man, or a woman for that matter, in different ways. Maybe way back, way back in the cradle it was that first sense that there was more to the world that the four corners of that baby world existence and that if you could just, could just get over that little, little side board there might be something better, much better over the horizon. But, frankly that just seems like too much of a literary stretch even for me, moody teenage boy that I am, to swallow so let’s just say that it started once I knew that the ocean was a way to get away, if you needed to get away. But see I didn’t figure than one out for myself even, old Kenny from the old neighborhood in third grade is the one who got me hip to that, and then Johnny James and his brother filled in the rest of the blanks and so then I was sea-worthy, dream sea-worthy anyway.
But, honestly, that sea dream stuff can only be music for the future because right now I am stuck, although I do not always feel stuck about it, trying to figure my way out of high school world, or at least figure out the raging things that I want to do after high school that fill up my daydream time (study hall time, if you really want to know). Of course, as well, that part about the ocean just mentioned, well there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my-back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that meant I had to head west. Right now west though is Harvard Square, its doings and not doings, it trumpet call to words, and sounds, and actions in the October Friday night all-night storm brewing.
The train now rounds the squeaky-sounding bend out of Central Square and stops at the underground Harvard Square station. So now I leave my pensive seat and stand waiting, waiting for the driver to release the pressure to let the sliding train door open, getting ready to jump off the old subway, two-step-at-a-time my way up the two flights of stairs and head for mecca to see if things jump for me tonight. The doors open at last. Up the two-stepped stairs I go, get to the surface and confront the old double-glassed Hayes door entrance and survey the vast table-filled room that at this hour has a few night owl stranglers spotted randomly throughout the place.
You know the old Hayes-Bickford, or one of them, if you live in Boston or New York City, or a few other places on the East Coast, don’t you? Put your tray on the metal slider (hey, I don’t know what you call that slider thing, okay) and cruise down the line from item to item behind the glass-enclosed bins of, mostly, steamy food, if you are looking for fast service, for a quick between doing things, pressing things, meal. Steamed and breaded everything from breakfast to lunch to dinner anytime topped off by dishwater quality coffee (refills on demand, if you feel lucky).
This is not the place to bring your date, certainly not your first date, except maybe for a quick cup of that coffee before going to some event, or home. What this is, really, is a place where you can hang out, and hang out with comfort, because nobody, nobody at all, is going to ask you to leave, at least if you act half-way human. And that is what this place is really about, the humans in all their human conditions doing human things, alien to you or not, that you see floating by you, as you take a seat at one of the one-size-fits all wooden tables with those red vinyl seat covered chairs replete with paper place settings, a few off-hand eating utensils and the usual obligatory array of condiments to help get down the food and drink offered here.
Let me describe who is here at this hour on an early Saturday morning in October 1962. I will not vouch for other times, or other days, but I know Friday and Saturday nights a little so I can say something about them. Of course there is the last drink at the last open barroom crowd, said bar already well-closed in blue law Massachusetts, trying to get sober enough by eating a little food to traverse the road home. Good luck. Needless to say eating food in an all-night cafeteria, any all-night cafeteria, means only one thing-the person is so caught up in a booze frenzy that he (mainly) or she (very occasionally) is desperate for anything to hang the name food on to. Frankly, except for the obligatory hard-dollar coffee-steamed to its essence, then through some mystical alchemic process re-beaned, and served in heavy ceramic mugs that keep in the warmth to keep the eyes open the food here is strictly for the, well, the desperate, drunk or sober.
I might mention a little more about the food as I go along but it is strictly to add color to this little story. Maybe, maybe it will add color to the story but this is mainly about the “literary” life at the old Hayes and the quest for the blue-pink night not the cuisine so don’t hold me to it. Here is the kicker though; there are a few, mercifully few this night, old winos, habitual drunks, and street vagabonds (I am being polite here) who are nuzzling their food, for real. This is the way that you can tell the "last drink" boys, the hail fellows well met, who are just out on the town and who probably go to one of the ten zillion colleges in the area and are drawn like moths (and like wayward high schools kids, including this writer) to the magic name, Harvard Square. They just pick at their food. Those other guys (again, mainly, guys) those habituals and professional waywards work at it like it is their last chance for salvation.
Harvard Square, bright lights, dead of nights, see the sights. That vision is nothing but a commercial, a commercial magnet for every young (and old) hustler within fifty miles of the place to come and display their “acumen”. Their hustle. Three card Monte, quick-change artistry, bait and hook, a little jack-rolling, fake dope-plying, lifting an off-hand wallet, the whole gamut of hustler con lore. On any given Harvard Square weekend night there have got to be more young, naïve, starry-eyed kids hanging out trying to be cool, but really, like me, just learning the ropes of life than you could shake a stick at to set a hustler’s heart, if he (mainly) or she (sometimes) had a heart.
I’ll tell you about a quick con that got me easy in a second but right now let me tell you that at this hour I can see a few con artists just now resting up after a hard night’s work around a couple of tables, comparing notes (or, more likely, trying to con each other, there is no honor among thieves in this little night world. Go to it boys). As to the con that got me, hey it was simple, a guy, an older guy, a twenty-five year old or something like that guy, came up to me while I was talking to a friend and said did I (we) want to get some booze. Sober, sixteen years old, and thrill-seeking I said sure (drinking booze is the coin of the realm for thrills these days, among high school kids that I know, maybe the older set, those college guys, are, I hear, experimenting with drugs but if so it is very on the QT).
He said name your poison, I did, and then he “suggested” a little something for himself. Sure, whatever is right. I gave him the money and he returned a few minutes later with a small bag with the top of a liquor bottle hanging out. He split. We went off to a private area around Harvard Yard (Phillips Brook House, I think) and got ready to have our first serious taste of booze, and maybe get rum brave enough to pick up some girls. Naturally, the bottle is a booze bottle alright but it had been opened (how long before is anyone’s guess) and filled with water. Sucker, right. Now the only reason that I am mentioning this story right now is that the guy who pulled this con is sitting, sitting like the King of Siam, just a few tables away from where I am sitting. The lesson learned for the road, for the future road that beckons: don’t accept packages from strangers without inspecting them and watch out for cons, right? No, hell no. The lesson is this: sure don’t fall for wise guy tricks but the big thing is to shake it off, forget about it if you see the con artist again. You are way to cool to let him (or occasionally her) think that they have conned you. Out loud, anyway.
But wait, I am not here at almost four o’clock in the Hayes-Bickford morning, the Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford morning, to talk about the decor, the food if that is what it is, about the clientele, humble, slick, or otherwise. I am here looking for “talent,” literary talent that is. See, I have been here enough, and have heard enough about the ”beats” (or rather pseudo-beats, or “late phase” beats at this time) and the “folkies” (music people breaking out of the Pop 40 music scene and going back to the roots of America music, way back) to know that a bunch of them, about six in all, right this minute are sitting in a far corner with a light drum tapping the beat listening to a guy in black pants(always de rigueur black), sneakers and a flannel shirt just like me reciting his latest poem. That possibility is what drove me here this night, and other nights as well. See the Hayes is known as the place where someone like Norman Mailer has his buttered toast after one of his “last drink” bouts. Or that Bob Dylan sat at that table, that table right over there, writing something on a napkin. Or some parallel poet to the one now wrapping up his seventy-seven verse imitation Allen Ginsberg's Howl master work went out to San Francisco and blew the lid off the town, the City Lights town, the literary town.
But I better, now that the five-ish dawn light is hovering after my dawdlings, trying to break through the night wars, get my droopy body down those subway stairs pretty soon and back across town before anyone at home notices that I am missing. Still I will take the hard-bitten coffee, re-beaned and all, I will take the sleepy eyes that are starting to weigh down my face, I will even take the con artists and feisty drunks just so that I can be here when somebody’s search for the blue-pink great American West night, farther west than Harvard Square night, gets launched.
An Encore –Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Reverend Gary Davis Performing On Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest".
CD Review
Reverend Gary Davis: At Home:1964-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of Stefan Grossman’s Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here which have a decidedly more religious bent than a previously reviewed “Twelve Keys To The City” CD are “I Am The True Vine", "Soon My Work Will Be Done" , "I Want To Be Saved,” the gospelly "Blow Gabriel" and “Tired, My Soul Needs Resting”
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at the beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
*******
Blow, Gabriel, Blow Lyrics
[RENO]
Brothers and sisters, we are here tonight to fight the devil...
Do you hear that playin'?
[COMPANY]
Yes, we hear that playin'!
[RENO]
Do you know who's playin'?
[COMPANY]
No, who is that playin'?
[RENO]
Well, it's Gabriel, Gabriel playin'!
Gabriel, Gabriel sayin'
"Will you be ready to go
When I blow my horn?"
Oh, blow, Gabriel, blow,
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Oh, I was low, Gabriel, low,
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since I have seen the light,
I'm good by day and I'm good by night,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Come on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Come on you scamps, get up you sinners!
You're all too full of expensive dinners.
Stand up on your lazy feet and sing!
[ALL]
Blow, Gabriel, blow, (Blow, Gabriel!)
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow. (Blow, Gabriel!)
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
I was low, Gabriel, low, (Low, Gabriel!)
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since that I have seen the light
I'm good by day and I'm good by night
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
[RENO]
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel!
[ALL]
Go on and...
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
I wanna join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land,
So blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow!
CD Review
Reverend Gary Davis: At Home:1964-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of Stefan Grossman’s Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here which have a decidedly more religious bent than a previously reviewed “Twelve Keys To The City” CD are “I Am The True Vine", "Soon My Work Will Be Done" , "I Want To Be Saved,” the gospelly "Blow Gabriel" and “Tired, My Soul Needs Resting”
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at the beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
*******
Blow, Gabriel, Blow Lyrics
[RENO]
Brothers and sisters, we are here tonight to fight the devil...
Do you hear that playin'?
[COMPANY]
Yes, we hear that playin'!
[RENO]
Do you know who's playin'?
[COMPANY]
No, who is that playin'?
[RENO]
Well, it's Gabriel, Gabriel playin'!
Gabriel, Gabriel sayin'
"Will you be ready to go
When I blow my horn?"
Oh, blow, Gabriel, blow,
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Oh, I was low, Gabriel, low,
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since I have seen the light,
I'm good by day and I'm good by night,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Come on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Come on you scamps, get up you sinners!
You're all too full of expensive dinners.
Stand up on your lazy feet and sing!
[ALL]
Blow, Gabriel, blow, (Blow, Gabriel!)
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow. (Blow, Gabriel!)
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
I was low, Gabriel, low, (Low, Gabriel!)
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since that I have seen the light
I'm good by day and I'm good by night
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
[RENO]
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel!
[ALL]
Go on and...
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
I wanna join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land,
So blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow!
Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Reverend Gary Davis Performing On Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest".
CD Review
Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of Stefan Grossman’s Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here are the much-covered "Samson and Delilah", "Cocaine Blues" (from when it was legal, of course, although still sinful, naturally), "Twelve Keys To The City" and the gospelly "Blow Gabriel" and “Who Shall Deliver Poor Me”
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at the beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
*******
Blow, Gabriel, Blow Lyrics
[RENO]
Brothers and sisters, we are here tonight to fight the devil...
Do you hear that playin'?
[COMPANY]
Yes, we hear that playin'!
[RENO]
Do you know who's playin'?
[COMPANY]
No, who is that playin'?
[RENO]
Well, it's Gabriel, Gabriel playin'!
Gabriel, Gabriel sayin'
"Will you be ready to go
When I blow my horn?"
Oh, blow, Gabriel, blow,
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Oh, I was low, Gabriel, low,
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since I have seen the light,
I'm good by day and I'm good by night,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Come on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Come on you scamps, get up you sinners!
You're all too full of expensive dinners.
Stand up on your lazy feet and sing!
[ALL]
Blow, Gabriel, blow, (Blow, Gabriel!)
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow. (Blow, Gabriel!)
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
I was low, Gabriel, low, (Low, Gabriel!)
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since that I have seen the light
I'm good by day and I'm good by night
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
[RENO]
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel!
[ALL]
Go on and...
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
I wanna join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land,
So blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow!
CD Review
Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of Stefan Grossman’s Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here are the much-covered "Samson and Delilah", "Cocaine Blues" (from when it was legal, of course, although still sinful, naturally), "Twelve Keys To The City" and the gospelly "Blow Gabriel" and “Who Shall Deliver Poor Me”
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at the beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.
*******
Blow, Gabriel, Blow Lyrics
[RENO]
Brothers and sisters, we are here tonight to fight the devil...
Do you hear that playin'?
[COMPANY]
Yes, we hear that playin'!
[RENO]
Do you know who's playin'?
[COMPANY]
No, who is that playin'?
[RENO]
Well, it's Gabriel, Gabriel playin'!
Gabriel, Gabriel sayin'
"Will you be ready to go
When I blow my horn?"
Oh, blow, Gabriel, blow,
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Oh, I was low, Gabriel, low,
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since I have seen the light,
I'm good by day and I'm good by night,
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Come on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel, blow!
Come on you scamps, get up you sinners!
You're all too full of expensive dinners.
Stand up on your lazy feet and sing!
[ALL]
Blow, Gabriel, blow, (Blow, Gabriel!)
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow. (Blow, Gabriel!)
I've been a sinner, I've been a scamp,
But now I'm willin' to trim my lamp,
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
I was low, Gabriel, low, (Low, Gabriel!)
Mighty low, Gabriel, low.
But now since that I have seen the light
I'm good by day and I'm good by night
So blow, Gabriel, blow.
[RENO]
Once I was headed for hell,
Once I was headed for hell;
But when I got to Satan's door
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,
So I said, "Satan, farewell!"
And now I'm all ready to fly,
Yes, to fly higher and higher!
'Cause I've gone through brimstone
And I've been through the fire,
And I purged my soul
And my heart too,
So climb up the mountaintop
And start to blow, Gabriel, blow
[ALL]
Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow!
[RENO]
I want to join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land.
So blow, Gabriel!
[ALL]
Go on and...
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
Blow, Gabriel, blow
I wanna join your happy band
And play all day in the Promised Land,
So blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow, Gabriel, blow!
Monday, April 23, 2012
Out In The 1950s Be-Bop King Records R&B Night-“Dancing With The Devil”-A You Had Better Get In Line Because Her Dance Card Is Full- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Lonnie Johnson high heaven singing the classic R&B, rock and rock, bop and stroll, Tomorrow Night. Yes, Lonnie is in the house.
DVD Review
Dancing With the Devil: 25 Essential Blues Classics, various artists, King Records. 2004
Okay, okay call me Mr. Janus, call me fickle, call me, well, call me perplexed. Every time I think I have it down pat, pat as can be, about what genre “fathered” (or “mothered”) my “generation of ’68” childhood growing up absurd in the half-benighted 1950s rock and roll birth I change course. Mainly it depends on what was the last CD, last YouTube click , or last whatever other source I have filled my head with. A couple of weeks ago it was definitely those mad men swing masters like Benny Goodman and his hard, sexy sax players (and occasional clarinet per Benny swingman). A couple of days later it was definitely Joe Turner be-bopping his big snapping fingers beat on Shake, Rattle and Roll putting later Elvis and Jerry Lee renditions in the shade. Last week it was most positively either Ike Turner and his Rocket 88 or rockabilly maven Warren Smith and his Rock and Roll Ruby. This week, well, this week it is the R&B influences represented by this King Records compilation, Dancing With The Devil: 25 Essential Blues Classics. So hear me out.
Look I grew up in that red scare, cold war, atomic bomb’s going to get you so you best put your sorry little head under that wooden desk and don’t ask questions dark night made darker by being left out of the great American golden age 1950s by, well, by being working class poor. I mean real poor. The music around the house was strictly country (Hank Williams, Earl Tubbs, etc.) representing my father’s rural Appalachian roots or that 1940s Frank, Bing, Rosemary Clooney, we won the world war so our songs rule stuff blaring out of the local holey radio station. It was not until I got my first transistor radio (look that up on Wikipedia if you are clueless about what that was (or is for old fogies, maybe). Then I could pirate my way to many midnight stations in the “comfort” (three boys to a room comfort so not much) of my room. And what I got at midnight was blues, or rather R&B coming from who knows where but not Boston (usually Chicago or New York) from people who distinctly did not sound like they were from Boston.
And they weren’t. They mainly had come north from the rural South in one of the waves of black migration up river (Mississippi River, okay), got jobs in the factories, or didn’t, and played music on the side at some electrified juke joint. Those who did make good music wound up making records for all kinds of “race” labels so there was no mystery as to why I didn’t know this music from around the house. But I knew it
from then on. And I know it now.
That now leads to this King Records compilation which, no question, has many, many riffs that sound a hell of a lot like the birth of rock and roll just now. Try Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night done later by Elvis, LaVern Baker, Jerry Lee and a million others. Or what about the beat in Wynonnie Harris’ All She Wants To Do Is Rock. How about Little Esther on Aged And Mellow Blues. Not good enough-try this. Wilbert Harrison on This Women Of Mine. Or the freaking rock beat on Earl King’s Don’t Take It So Hard. Okay now for the big ammo Joe Tex’s Another Woman’s Man and Hank Ballard’s Look At Little Sister. I thought that would get your attention. But let’s cut to the chase. The Stones and Beatles (and many others from the 1960s second wave British rock invasion) were spoon-fed on R&B and blues stuff. And while this particular song by Albert King, Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong (good advice, by the way) is a little too late to have been at the roots of rock it has all the guitar riffs that those later groups thrived on. So I rest my case. Unless of course next week I hear Sonny Burgess’ Red-Headed Woman. Then call be Janus.
DVD Review
Dancing With the Devil: 25 Essential Blues Classics, various artists, King Records. 2004
Okay, okay call me Mr. Janus, call me fickle, call me, well, call me perplexed. Every time I think I have it down pat, pat as can be, about what genre “fathered” (or “mothered”) my “generation of ’68” childhood growing up absurd in the half-benighted 1950s rock and roll birth I change course. Mainly it depends on what was the last CD, last YouTube click , or last whatever other source I have filled my head with. A couple of weeks ago it was definitely those mad men swing masters like Benny Goodman and his hard, sexy sax players (and occasional clarinet per Benny swingman). A couple of days later it was definitely Joe Turner be-bopping his big snapping fingers beat on Shake, Rattle and Roll putting later Elvis and Jerry Lee renditions in the shade. Last week it was most positively either Ike Turner and his Rocket 88 or rockabilly maven Warren Smith and his Rock and Roll Ruby. This week, well, this week it is the R&B influences represented by this King Records compilation, Dancing With The Devil: 25 Essential Blues Classics. So hear me out.
Look I grew up in that red scare, cold war, atomic bomb’s going to get you so you best put your sorry little head under that wooden desk and don’t ask questions dark night made darker by being left out of the great American golden age 1950s by, well, by being working class poor. I mean real poor. The music around the house was strictly country (Hank Williams, Earl Tubbs, etc.) representing my father’s rural Appalachian roots or that 1940s Frank, Bing, Rosemary Clooney, we won the world war so our songs rule stuff blaring out of the local holey radio station. It was not until I got my first transistor radio (look that up on Wikipedia if you are clueless about what that was (or is for old fogies, maybe). Then I could pirate my way to many midnight stations in the “comfort” (three boys to a room comfort so not much) of my room. And what I got at midnight was blues, or rather R&B coming from who knows where but not Boston (usually Chicago or New York) from people who distinctly did not sound like they were from Boston.
And they weren’t. They mainly had come north from the rural South in one of the waves of black migration up river (Mississippi River, okay), got jobs in the factories, or didn’t, and played music on the side at some electrified juke joint. Those who did make good music wound up making records for all kinds of “race” labels so there was no mystery as to why I didn’t know this music from around the house. But I knew it
from then on. And I know it now.
That now leads to this King Records compilation which, no question, has many, many riffs that sound a hell of a lot like the birth of rock and roll just now. Try Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night done later by Elvis, LaVern Baker, Jerry Lee and a million others. Or what about the beat in Wynonnie Harris’ All She Wants To Do Is Rock. How about Little Esther on Aged And Mellow Blues. Not good enough-try this. Wilbert Harrison on This Women Of Mine. Or the freaking rock beat on Earl King’s Don’t Take It So Hard. Okay now for the big ammo Joe Tex’s Another Woman’s Man and Hank Ballard’s Look At Little Sister. I thought that would get your attention. But let’s cut to the chase. The Stones and Beatles (and many others from the 1960s second wave British rock invasion) were spoon-fed on R&B and blues stuff. And while this particular song by Albert King, Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong (good advice, by the way) is a little too late to have been at the roots of rock it has all the guitar riffs that those later groups thrived on. So I rest my case. Unless of course next week I hear Sonny Burgess’ Red-Headed Woman. Then call be Janus.
On The Anniversary Of Easter 1916-When The Harp Was Buried Beneath Crown- For James Connolly Commandant, Irish Citizens Army
On The Anniversary Of Easter 1916-When The Harp Was Buried Beneath Crown- For James Connolly Commandant, Irish Citizens Army
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHm18K3kjs&noredirect=1
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Machem performing a song of Irish national liberation, Easter 1916.
The Clancy Brothers, The Rising Of The Moon,
The following review was used to comment on several of the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Machem recordings back in the day, the 1960s day anyway, when they performed many times in America and various members stayed here for stretches at a time. The obvious musical skills, sheer talent, and commitment to craftsmanship of this group during its history need no comment by me. Nor does their commitment to keeping the Irish folk tradition alive beyond the known and by now well-worn Saint Patrick’s Day “everybody is green” traditions Thus the criterion for my reviews was solely based only whether and how closely the works represented the political traditions associated with the historic struggle for independence from the English, the bloody eight hundred year oppression. The Yeatsian Easter 1916 “terrible beauty is born” saga
A word. As I developed a quasi- leftist political consciousness, frankly, nothing then really more than a studied left liberalism, red scare, cold war variant, tepid, very tepid and timid upon reflection, in my youth I also, in an unsystematic and for the most part then unconscious manner, developed an interest in what is today is called roots music. Initially this was reflected in my first love-the blues, music that spoke to that hard times growing up poor in a world, or rather a country, that was frowning on poorness. The old country blues of the Mississippi Delta sweat labor, share-cropping, hard-drinking, hard moaning, no electricity juke joint Saturday night where you got a woman or a knife, maybe both, maybe neither. Or up river, sweet home Chicago, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf cries in the great neon electric industrial night.
During the early sixties, under the influence of Dave Van Ronk, first heard on some local almost mythical folk hour, called hootenanny or some such name, singing out of some graveyard voice from those hills and hollows down Kentucky way, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies I developed an interest in folk music, then at the height of its revival minute. Then, in turn, came Bob Dylan storming heaven or hell to be the voice of our generation, at least in song, Pete Seeger methodically keeping the “faith” alive against the rock influence that drove our generation to distraction, Woody Guthrie linking us back to dustbowl, hobo, tramp, road bumming wobblie days, and the rest. It is through this process that I, almost accidentally, came to appreciate the work of the artists under review.
This is an odd route, and I will explain why. I was actually reared on the material presented on this album by my maternal grandfather, a great supporter of the Irish Republican Army. I gained from him my own romantic attachment to the exploits of the IRA in 1916 and beyond that to independence and the continuing struggle in the north. Although my own political evolution since then has led me away from political support to the IRA I still love the old songs which represent the spirit of Irish national identity and aspirations for national liberation historically suppressed by the bloody English.
A word about the songs presented here. The liner notes included with the CD are very helpful. The songs range in subject from ‘The Rising of the Moon’ at the time of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishman, probably the last time that a united, independent, non-sectarian single Irish state was possible, to ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘Sean Treacy’ just before the partition in 1921, creating the mess that still confronts us politically today. That said, as these lines are being written we are approaching the 96th Anniversary of the Easter Uprising of 1916. The vision that James Connolly, and the others, of a workers’ Social Republic as proclaimed at the General Post Office still waits. In short, there is still work to be done, North and South, united or as independent states. Listen to these songs to understand where we have come from and why we still need to fight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHm18K3kjs&noredirect=1
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Machem performing a song of Irish national liberation, Easter 1916.
The Clancy Brothers, The Rising Of The Moon,
The following review was used to comment on several of the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Machem recordings back in the day, the 1960s day anyway, when they performed many times in America and various members stayed here for stretches at a time. The obvious musical skills, sheer talent, and commitment to craftsmanship of this group during its history need no comment by me. Nor does their commitment to keeping the Irish folk tradition alive beyond the known and by now well-worn Saint Patrick’s Day “everybody is green” traditions Thus the criterion for my reviews was solely based only whether and how closely the works represented the political traditions associated with the historic struggle for independence from the English, the bloody eight hundred year oppression. The Yeatsian Easter 1916 “terrible beauty is born” saga
A word. As I developed a quasi- leftist political consciousness, frankly, nothing then really more than a studied left liberalism, red scare, cold war variant, tepid, very tepid and timid upon reflection, in my youth I also, in an unsystematic and for the most part then unconscious manner, developed an interest in what is today is called roots music. Initially this was reflected in my first love-the blues, music that spoke to that hard times growing up poor in a world, or rather a country, that was frowning on poorness. The old country blues of the Mississippi Delta sweat labor, share-cropping, hard-drinking, hard moaning, no electricity juke joint Saturday night where you got a woman or a knife, maybe both, maybe neither. Or up river, sweet home Chicago, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf cries in the great neon electric industrial night.
During the early sixties, under the influence of Dave Van Ronk, first heard on some local almost mythical folk hour, called hootenanny or some such name, singing out of some graveyard voice from those hills and hollows down Kentucky way, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies I developed an interest in folk music, then at the height of its revival minute. Then, in turn, came Bob Dylan storming heaven or hell to be the voice of our generation, at least in song, Pete Seeger methodically keeping the “faith” alive against the rock influence that drove our generation to distraction, Woody Guthrie linking us back to dustbowl, hobo, tramp, road bumming wobblie days, and the rest. It is through this process that I, almost accidentally, came to appreciate the work of the artists under review.
This is an odd route, and I will explain why. I was actually reared on the material presented on this album by my maternal grandfather, a great supporter of the Irish Republican Army. I gained from him my own romantic attachment to the exploits of the IRA in 1916 and beyond that to independence and the continuing struggle in the north. Although my own political evolution since then has led me away from political support to the IRA I still love the old songs which represent the spirit of Irish national identity and aspirations for national liberation historically suppressed by the bloody English.
A word about the songs presented here. The liner notes included with the CD are very helpful. The songs range in subject from ‘The Rising of the Moon’ at the time of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishman, probably the last time that a united, independent, non-sectarian single Irish state was possible, to ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘Sean Treacy’ just before the partition in 1921, creating the mess that still confronts us politically today. That said, as these lines are being written we are approaching the 96th Anniversary of the Easter Uprising of 1916. The vision that James Connolly, and the others, of a workers’ Social Republic as proclaimed at the General Post Office still waits. In short, there is still work to be done, North and South, united or as independent states. Listen to these songs to understand where we have come from and why we still need to fight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)