Searching For The American Songbook - In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With The Joy Street Coffeehouse In Mind-Introduction

 

 

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

I recently completed the second leg of this series, sketches from the time of my coming of age classic rock and roll from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19^th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, record player, television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. This series was not intended to be placed in any chronological order so the first leg dealt, and I think naturally given the way my musical interests got formed, with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. This leg is centered on the music of the folk minute that captured a segment of my generation of ’68 as it came of social and political age in the early 1960s. A time when some of us felt a fresh breeze was coming through the land and we tired of the Fabians, the various Bobbys (Vee, Darin, Rydell, etc.), the various incarnations of Sandra Dee, Leslie Gore, Brenda Lee, etc. wanted a new sound, or as it turned out a flowing back to the roots music, blues, some jazz, mountain music, Tex-Mex, Western swing, Child ballads and the “new wave” protest sound that connected our new breeze political understandings with our musical interests. The folk music minute was for me, and now just me, thus something of a branching off for a while from rock in its doldrums since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a small musical break-out from the music that we came of chronological age to unlike the big break-out that rock and roll represented from the music that was wafting through many of our parents’ houses in the early 1950s.

I have been grabbing a lot of anecdotal remarks from some old-time folkies to aid in this leg, those folkies who are still alive and kicking and still interested in talking about that minute. For those not in the know folk music is alive and well in little enclaves throughout the country mainly in New England but in other outposts as well. Those enclaves and outposts are places where some old “hippies,” “folkies,” communalists, went after the big splash 1960s counter-cultural explosion ebbed about 1971 (that is my signpost for the ebb, others have earlier and later dates and events which seemed decisive but all agree by the mid-1970s that wave had tepidly limped to shore). Places like Saratoga, New York, Big Sur, Joshua Tree, Taos, Eugene, Boise, Butte, Boulder, as well as the traditional Village, Harvard Square haunts of memory. They survive, all of them, through the support of a dwindling number in once a month Universalist-Unitarian church basement coffeehouses, school activity rooms booked for the occasional night, small restaurants and bars sponsoring “open mics” on off-nights to draw a little bigger crowd, and probably plenty of other small ad hoc venues where there are enough people with guitars, mandos, harmonicas, and what have you to while away an evening.             

There seems to be a consensus among my anecdotal sources  that their first encounter with folk music back then, other than in the junior high school music class where you would get a quick checkerboard of various types of music and maybe hear This Land Is Your Land in passing, was through the radio. A few that I had run into back then, fewer now, including a couple of girlfriends picked up the music via their parents’ record collections although that was rare and usually meant that the parents had been some kind of progressives back in the 1930s and 1940s when Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Pete Seeger and others lit up the leftist firmament in places like wide-open New York City.) That radio by the way would be the transistor radio usually purchased at now faded Radio Shack that was attached to all our youthful ears placed there away from prying parents and somehow if you were near an urban area you might once you tired of the “bubble gum” music on the local rock station flip the dial and get lucky some late night, usually Sunday and find an errant station playing such fare.

That actually was my experience one night, one Sunday night in the winter of 1962 (month and date lost in the fog of memory) when I was just flipping the dial and came upon the voice of a guy, an old pappy guy I assumed, singing a strange song in a gravelly voice which intrigued me because that was not a rock song or rock voice. The format of the show as I soon figured out as I continued to listen that night was that the DJ would, unlike the rock stations which played one song and then interrupted the flow with at least one commercial, played several songs so I did not find out who the singer as until a few songs later. The song was identified by the DJ as the old classic mountain tune “discovered” by Cecil Sharpe in 1916 Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, the singer Dave Von Ronk, the station WBZ in Boston, the DJ Dick Summer. I was hooked. That program also played country blues stuff, stuff that folk aficionados had discovered down south and which would lead to the “re-discovery” of the likes of Son House, Bukka White, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt. I eventually really learned about the blues, which will be the next leg of this series, straight up though from occasionally getting late, late at night, usually Sunday for some reason, Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour from WXKE in Chicago but that is another story. (Somebody once explained to me the science behind what happened on certain nights with the distant radio waves that showed up mostly because then their frequencies overrode closer signals. What I know for sure that it was not was the power of that dinky transistor radio with its two nothing batteries. So for a while it took it as a sign of the new dispensation coming to free us. Praise be.          

If the first exposure for many of us was through the radio, especially those a bit removed from urban areas, the thing that made most of us “folkies” of whatever duration was the discovery and appeal of the coffeehouses. According to legend (Dave Von Ronk legend anyway) in the 1950s such places were hang-outs for “beat” poets when that Kerouac/Ginsberg/Cassady flame was all the rage and folkies were reduced to clearing the house between shows but in the early 1960s the dime turned and it was all about folk music. Hence the appeal for me of Harvard Square. With Club 47, the “flagship,” obviously, Café Nana, the Algiers, Café Blanco, and a number of other coffeehouses all located within a few blocks of each other in the Square there were plenty of spots which drew us in to that location.

The beauty of such places for high school or college students interested in the folk scene was that for the price of coffee and maybe some off-hand pastry (usually a brownie or wedge of cake not always fresh but who cared as long as the coffee, usually expresso to get a high caffeine kick, which was fresh since it was made by the cup from elaborate copper-plated coffeemakers from Europe or someplace like that, you could sit there for a few hours and listen to up and coming folk artists working out the kinks in their routines. Occasionally there was a few dollar cover for “established acts like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, the Clancy Brothers, permanent Square fixture Eric Von Schmidt, but mainly they worked for the “basket,” hoping against hope to get twenty buck to cover rent and avoid starving until the next gig. Of course since the audience was low budget high school students, college kids and starving artists that goal was sometimes a close thing and the landlord would have to be pieced off with a few bucks until times got better. Yeah, those were “from hunger” days at the beginning for most performers (and for some of them later too).

For alienated and angst-ridden youth like me, although I am not sure I would have used those words for my feeling in those days or if I did it was out of sympathy for the outcasts, misfits, and beaten down who I identified with then, the coffeehouses also offered sanctuary to get away from the home-front battles for independence but that too is a story for another day. For others (and me too on occasion) those establishments also provided a very cheap way to deal with the date issue, as long as you picked dates who shared your folk interests. That pick was important because more than once I took a promising date to the Joy Street in Back Bay and that was the end of that promise.  For those that shared my interest for the price of two coffees(which were maybe fifty cents each, something like that, but don’t take that as gospel), maybe a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” to show you appreciated the efforts, got you those hours of entertainment. But mainly the reason to go to the Square was to hear the music that as my first interest blossomed I could not find on the radio, except that Dick Summer show on Sunday night for a couple of hours. Later it got better with more shows, some television play when the thing got big enough that even the networks caught on with bogus clean-cut  Hootenanny-type shows, and because you could start grabbing records at places like Sandy’s in between Harvard and Central Squares.                

Of course sometimes if you did not have dough, if you had no date, and yet you still had those home front civil wars to contend and needed a retreat you could still wind up in the Square. Many a weekend night Iate, sneaking out of the house through a convenient back door, I would grab the then all-night Redline subway to the Square and at the stop (that was the end of the line then) take the stairs to the street two steps at a time and bingo have the famous (or infamous) all-night Hayes-Bickford in front of me. There as long as you were not rowdy like the winos, hoboes, and con men you could sit at a table and watch the mix and match crowds come and go. Nobody bothered you, certainly not the hired help who were hiding away someplace at those hours and since it was cafeteria-style passing your tray down a line filled steamed  stuff and incredibly weak coffee that tasted like dishwater must taste, you did not have to fend off waitresses. (I remember the first time I went in by myself I sat, by design, at a table that somebody had vacated with the dinnerware still not cleared away and with the coffee mug half full and claimed the cup to keep in front of me. When the busboy, some high school kid like me, came to clear the table he “hipped me” to the fact that nobody gave a rat’s ass if you bought anything just don’t act up and draw attention to yourself. Good advice, brother.)

Some nights you might be there when some guy or gal was, in a low voice, singing their latest creation, working up their act in any case to a small coterie of people in front of them. That was the real import of the place, you were there on the inside where the new breeze that everybody in the Square was expecting took off and you hoped you would get caught up in the fervor too. Nice.         

 

As I mentioned in the rock and roll series, which really was the music of our coming of age time, folk was the music of our social and political coming of age time. A fair amount of that sentiment got passed along to us during our folk minute as we sought out different explanations for the events of the day, reacted against the grain of what was conventional knowledge. Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That clueless in the past included a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Jack or Jill or Chi town frat or frail and whose father had busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.

Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from the commercial Tin Pan Alley song stuff. The staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he our parents’ organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike). Hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential. And as we matured Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.    

We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a newer world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.

These following sketches and as with the previous two series that is all they are, and all they pretend to be, link up the music of the generation of ‘68s social and political coming of age time gleaned from old time personal remembrances, the remembrances of old time folkies recently met and of those met long ago in the Club 47s, Café Lenas, Club Paradise, Café North Beach night.

The truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of old-time corner boys like me and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s bolwing alleys must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully.

Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. The lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days, and that was about par for the course, wasn’t it. But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to  satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth  we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.