Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell 

 

Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. Prior to viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days when chance had caused him to meet Frank after his family had moved from Clintonville in the summer before fifth grade and caused the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade to create their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails.    

What got Jack thinking along those lines was that Frank had seen the film with his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, who had told Frank she had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film about the rise and fall of the iconic early 1960s group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period lately. The kind of things that Frank and Jack discussed at their sessions about growing up absurd in the 1950s since they had recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed him, for better or worse, no question.

Frank’s purpose had not though been to put paid to some ghosts of the past like a lot of guys he knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going to re-flame old sports dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of his other pals, Jimmy Jenkins who had gone to his fiftieth class reunion and came away more depressed than anything else since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already.

Moreover he certainly did not intend to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela any particular but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other his other later acquaintances Josh Breslin and Phil Larkin who were from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean. 

Of course lately Jack had been, feeding off Frank’s tidbits, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Frank and Jack both agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s interest in this film was the corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not all that unlike his Carver corner boy growing up saga.        

In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles the reformatory feared him, became famous in certain nefarious circles. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.

It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (girls who were cruising to the top the charts too they really weren’t interested in because there was no way they could get anything to help them from girl groups) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. The black aspect was not a big deal, or they didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television and beside they, meaning mainly Jack figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers. Again it was not all thought out in such a refined manner what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.   

That summer was when these corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there were not any stores in the “projects” their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School, on hot summer nights all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Limon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead figured they could cash in on.

That doo wop worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this had to do with sexually stirrings, with finally noticing that that shapeless girls from class were starting to get shapes and who in the years before had been nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night they crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche. At first they were left to themselves maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as the left the courts but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away just kind of listening. A few nights later there would be several girls standing at that distance. Jack thought that if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. The girls came running. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood.        

But see here is where things broke down. Sure they could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what happened. The problem though was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons, they really did not have any serious musical talent (except Red) and did not at they did have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s as well). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out for the ‘from hungers” on musical fame. He would a little later turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime (which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close).

Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd based on the midnight creeps around the houses of the Mayfair swells and some of those corner boys wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Red after he failed to make a career singing and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina).       

Those last parts, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons is important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth telling once again. And the Carver boys story too.   

[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some midnight wanderlust bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,  Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]