Road Song Blues-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

“What your all-time favorite road album, Sam?” asked his old friend Ralph Morris as they were driving to Washington for the nth time in order to place their warm bodies on the line once again for some progressive cause, this time the struggle against escalating war in the Middle East by the Obama administration. They had been doing such anti-war duty since they had “met” each back on May Day 1971 when they, Sam a very activist anti-warrior and Ralph a returned Vietnam veteran who had turned on a war that he had fought, among the thousands arrested for trying to “shut down the government if it would not shut down the war (the Vietnam War then for those too young or those who have forgotten). By the way while it might have been the nth time they had driven down to D.C. on these missions of mercy that was not always the way they had got there. In their youths they were as likely to have thumbed from either Boston, Sam’s base in those days, or Albany, Ralph’s base picking up rides from others heading that way for the same purposes or friendly truckers looking for somebody, anybody to talk to at seventy miles an hour having been on the road probably sixteen straight and going stir crazy.  In any case Sam and Ralph making sure they cleared the vicious Connecticut State Police on U.S. 95 or else they could expect, at the least, some serious hassles. Maybe they had taken the dreaded Greyhound bus with its eight million stops and the inevitable winding up beside (a) some scatter-brained mother who let her child run wild on her lap and who then exploded into your space as well, (b) some severely over-weight snoring behemoth, male or female, (c), some lonely-heart girl who you could tell if you had given any thought at all to talking to her had some serious mental health issues or she would be sitting in some “boss” car with some max daddy and not travelling alone on some forlorn public transportation. Maybe worse riding down with a busload of activists aboard a “movement” rented bus and the other denizens wanted to stay up all night talking politics, not bad in itself, but talk politics like they just invented the profession and wanted to fill your empty vessel with every arcane fact they had gleaned from the latest alternative newspapers or from Professor so-and-so in some introductory political science class. Hell, the Marxists were the worst, some obvious products of the leafy suburbs and elite colleges always talking about the class struggle and working people which is exactly the roots that both men had come from and so knew from day one of their respective existences exactly what the class struggle was even if they could not have named the phenomenon as such back then. Ralph reminded Sam that a couple of times they had gone “bourgeois,” (Sam’s expression since he actually did hang with some radicals and reds in Cambridge in the early 1970s when he was at his wits end about how to stop the “fucking,” also his word, Vietnam War before he met Ralph) when Sam had latched onto a Mayfair swell daughter from Radcliffe who insisted they all fly down to National Airport on poppa’s credit card (“poppa” her term of endearment). Her argument-they by flying rather than travelling the roads for ten hours up and then ten hours back would save time for other things, movement things of course since she was one of those leafy suburbs radicals that Sam was fatally attracted to at the time. Like then they didn’t have anything but time since they were that minute “full-time” activists. 

But this early Saturday morning spring day Sam and Ralph were as they had the majority of times after the big gold rush of the 1960s uprising ebbed into nothing driving in a car, this time Sam’s, down to D.C.  A call had come out from the National Anti-War Network headquartered in that town for all peace-loving groups and individuals to make their voices heard against the very most recent escalation of the war situation in the Middle East, in Iraq, with the announcement by the Obama administration that the government was upping the ante on the number of “advisors,” read troops on the ground being sent in. The ostensible reason given by the administration was to help, once again, to stem the panic of the Baghdad government over the constitutional inability of its own armed forces to not flee the minute an enemy cannon (or maybe any cannon) was heard in the distance. The enemy de jus now a nasty Islamic fundamentalist outfit called ISIS, and called about seven variations of that designation including the “self-proclaimed Islamic State” depending on which news source you got your news from. The funny part, at least Sam when he mentioned the “self-proclaimed” moniker that the newscasters were using ever since ISIS starting coming out of the hills of Syria and Iraq like bats out of hell, to Ralph back in the summer of 2014, was that they actually controlled enough land in the area to be de facto rulers of those regions. To be the Islamic State they claimed to control. Nobody then could claim they were not a state, except maybe the government in Baghdad whose writ barely extended beyond the city limits. Ralph thought that was ironic as well, especially since the regime in Baghdad was barely even holding the city itself at that point.    

That gives the “why” of why they were on the road that early morning. Hell the sun had not even come up and Ralph had not even had time to grab a cup of coffee when Sam drove up to his house in Troy where he had been born and grew up, raised a family and all of that. Sam had stayed with a cousin whom he had not seen in a while that Friday night in Albany and they agreed to get an early start for the long ride south. The “why” of the question though needs a little further explanation. Both men had  been immersed in the music of their generation, the generation Sam, the more literary of the two, had called the Generation of ’68, in recognition that that seminal year was decisive in many ways, not all good, for the fate of a small but significant segment of their generation. Of course that musical bonding meant for both of them the classic rock of their coming of age in the mid-1950s. The time of Elvis, Carl, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Wanda, Jerry Lee and a whole cast of lesser names and one-note johnnies and janies. For Ralph it had also meant a small appreciation of the blues, mostly Chicago blues of the Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, James Cotton strand and for Sam a very big appreciation of the folk music minute of the early 1960s. Folk, a genre that Ralph sneered at every time Sam, or anybody mentioned the word, or the times on trips like this when he hoped to high heaven that Sam would not go on and on about some folkie road songs when he had asked the question.

But coffee, or no coffee, as Ralph (who during the first stretch of the drive was the “co-pilot” and therefore in charge of the musical selections and the CDs in the car’s CD system) the question was on the floor. Was on the floor like it had been ever since they started driving down to D.C. some forty plus years before. It had become something like the rituals kids go through counting numbers of various states’ license plates on the road, or kinds of automobiles, or kinds of signs, you know to pass the time away. Although for Sam and Ralph it had more meaning since at any given point in their relationship the answer might have varied.     

Here are some examples. About ten years before, 2004,2005, when they were travelling down to protest the then “early” phase, another one of those escalations during the Bush administration of the now seemingly never-ending war in Iraq, Ralph had been in a second coming of Elvis phase. Somehow through YouTube or some Internet site he had heard Elvis’ One Night Of Sin and had flipped out(the original more sexually suggestive song not, One Night With You, the one released to the panicky parents public worried about the dreaded unnamed “s” word creeping up on their Jimmys and Marys). See while he was a child of the rock and roll 1950s he didn’t like Elvis or his music for the very simple reason that every girl in Troy (and probably America, if not the world) would have nothing to do with (a) guys who did not slick their hair back, (b) guys who could not swivel their hips, and, (c) who did not have Elvis’ patented sneer for them to take off their face. So it was personal (and Ralph was not alone as Sam mentioned one time about a schoolboy friend his, Bart Webber, who felt the same way at the time). But once Ralph heard that song he went out to Tower Records and got every Sun Recording Studio CD he could find (Sun, the recording studio of early Elvis, Elvis when he was lean and hungry and probably wore that sneer in earnest). So that trip was filled with Elvis, Elvis, Elvis all the way down including such classics as That’s Alright, Mama, Jailhouse Rock, and his version of Shake, Rattle and Roll. That turned out to be okay since Sam liked him too after not paying attention to his early music since about 1958, or whenever Elvis stopped being lean and hungry and started recording nondescript songs and ugly strictly for the dough movies.  So you know what Ralph’s answer would have been during his Elvis sighting.          

What had not been alright was during the first Gulf War (the one Bush I got heated about when Iraq went into Kuwait of all places) Sam had gotten back into a folk thing which Ralph though he had gotten over. Apparently Sam had, between marriages, he had been married and divorced twice (as had Ralph), gone on a “date” with some woman he met in a Harvard Square bar and she had wanted to go to the Club Passim (the then and current incarnation of the old Club 47 which spawned Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, The Jim Kweskin Jug Band and a million other one song folkies) to see, Jesus, to see Dave Von Ronk (Ralph’s expression). He had dated that woman, Leslie, for several months so he/they would cut up old touches about that folk minute of the 1960s. As a result when it was time to head to Washington in the early winter of 1991 Sam told Ralph that he had been saving the three CD set of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music he had just purchased (at a steep price for that was the early days of CDs and such “exotic” staples cost aficionados) for the trip down.  For those who do not know that compilation has over eighty songs from the hills and hollows, down in Appalachia and places like that. Ralph, an ex-Vietnam War soldier who had served eighteen months and as a result had turned drastically and dramatically against that war, and the American government’s endless wars ever since, was ready to lose his pacifistic feelings, ready to take up the gun again which he hadn’t shouldered since late 1969, as Sam told him that bit of news. And he, Ralph, would have to as co-pilot place the bloody things in the bloody CD player. That one is best left forgotten.             

Not to be forgotten though was the time when they went down to D.C. to protest Ronald Reagan’s merciless support for the Contras down in El Salvador (and Nicaragua when the American military spotlight hit that small nation) in the mid-1980s. Ralph had “re-discovered” the Doors a rock group which had provided the background music for a million midnight parties when the booze and drugs were being freely passed around. Sam was more than happy to have Ralph place those tapes in the tape-deck and blast away Light My Fire, L.A. Woman, The End, Spanish Caravan. And you know the time flew on that trip for some reason which need not detain us here.  

So you get the picture of the substance behind the “why” of Ralph’s question. And you might have also guessed although Ralph is not a lawyer by profession (he ran a high-skill electrical shop before he retired recently turning over the day to day operations to his son) that he had an answer to the question he was asking Sam on that trip. Just the week before he had been listening to WXKE, a country, a progressive country radio station according to Ralph when Sam asked about the kind of music played by the station, when he heard some lonesome cowboy voice singing a song called Colorado Girl. He liked it right away, liked it a lot and so waited for the DJ (a guy who called himself Sleepy LaGrange) to announce the song title and singer. Turned out to be a guy by the name of Townes Van Zandt, a guy who had had a disturbed life down in Texas and places like that and had died back in the mid-1990s from a heart attack probably brought on by heavy drug use but who had written a ton of songs that many other singers had covered. Ralph admitted (as did Sam) that he had never heard of the guy before. But he was the guy who wrote Pancho and Lefty that Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and a bunch of other singers had covered and which both men knew about. But Ralph was intrigued enough to go on YouTube and find out what else he had written. There was a ton of stuff on the site by him (or covers by others). Some very good, most kind of lonesome prairie dog sad, mostly with a very close call with reality. But Ralph was hooked. He did not have time to run over to Albany to the last remaining brick and mortar record store in the area to get some CDs for the road so he went on line to Amazon and downloaded a bunch on his iPod and so you know Ralph’s answer to his own question.     

As Sam stops at a truck stop diner off of U.S. 87 South so Ralph could get that desperate cup of coffee he needed to keep him awake for the next several hours they were listening to Van Zandt’s If I Needed You. The road ahead is long so we will have to want for Sam’s answer…