***After The Folk Minute Of The 1960s Faded- Keeping The Tradition Alive- The UU (Universalist-Unitarian) Folk Circuit

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I have spilled no little cyber-ink talking about one of the formative experiences of my young adulthood, the folk minute of the early 1960s which was ultimately dethroned, if that is the right word, by the British Invasion (the Beatles, the Stones, you know all those muppet guys your mother, looking at your hair, said needed a haircut but more importantly your girlfriend thought were “cute,”) a little by the rising Motown sound (all those great girl groups, you know The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, The Miracles and on and on listening to stuff that was not old time black country blues or even Chicago-etched electric blues but a more sophisticated sound that even your mother could like since they were earnest clean-cut boys and girls), and the sweep in of acid rock later in that decade  (your mother then wishing and praying for the muppet boys to come back, since looking again right at your hair, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison, Neal Young, and all those hippie bastards needed a haircut badly but more importantly your girlfriend, your new girlfriend thought were “groovy”).

That minute the time of the great interest in old timey roots music from down home Mississippi Delta country blues (and the “discovery” of John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and that old juke joint Saturday swig of liquor and a good woman gone wrong with some other guy and wouldn’t you like to cut him lyric) to jug bands (Memphis Jug Band, Cannon Stompers, name your state Shieks who an important section of the folk scene gravitated to with the likes of John Sebastian, Geoff Muldaur, Maria Muldaur, and Jim Kweskin forming and re-forming bands depending on who had a fast jug and a sweetbread kazoo) to mountain music (the music strangely enough of the old country for those hollows and hills folks who stayed put when the others deflowered the land and headed west to deflower other lands, the British Isles left behind once the land ran out or your forbears got run out for some offense against the king’s dignity, the Saturday night getting corn liquor high, fiddle, banjo, guitar, take your best girl with those ribbons in her hair music of my father’s people exemplified by the Carter Family in its various incarnations) to cowboy prairie (that going west itch never satisfied except for a minute on that Saturday blast down in some barn again your good girl swaying those petticoats with the likes of Bob Wills and his Playboys and for a short time Milton Brown and his crew) and a lot of other niche music. Music mainly craved by a young audience (mostly, a sign of the times trying to reverse that great vanilla assimilation driven by the immigrant-landed sons and daughters seeking to mesh with the great WASP central committee and their children flipping back to the roots) wearied by the pablum then current on AM radio (FM was the wave of the future, the place where acid rock, or let’s call it that to give Jerry, Jim, Janis, Jimi a name to hang onto, found a home before going bigtime in the late 1960s) where non-descript, purposely not-descript music filled the airwaves after Elvis died or whatever happened to him when he started making silly Blue Hawaii-type movies that even my girlfriend did not think were cute (all these girlfriend references are different young women from different times and not a single girl since I had and have had plenty of problems hanging onto the darlings but that is a story for another day and another venue), Chuck (who played with fire with Mister’s women and paid the price, a price being paid even today in our “post-racial” society), Jerry Lee (who loved too closely but who before the crash thrilled us with that scene on the back of the flat-bed truck flailing, there is no other way to put it, on High School Confidential in the film of the same name) and a handful of others, Buddy, Richie, the Big Bopper, Eddie who also crashed and burned.

So some of us were ready, more than ready when the new dispensation came breezing through first the radio (WBZ in the Boston area on Sunday night for starters, although I have heard more recently about folksinger Tom Rush via a documentary, No Regrets, putting folk music on the Harvard radio station map with Hillbilly at Harvard  so lots of smaller waves were coming forth) and then making the crosstown journey from North  Adamsville to Harvard Square the one of the American meccas for folk music (others being the Village, Ann Arbor, Old Town in Chicago, the Unicorn in Los Angeles and various places in San Francisco, all places which had some small long-standing traditions of caring about this kind of music).

And if one talked of Harvard Square in those days  then one had to talk about the Club 47 (now Club Passim in a different location by still providing that some kind of music for oldsters and new aficionados alike but then over on Mount Auburn Street up from Elsie’s Deli, the Harvard student savior hangout). But that was not the only location in the Square. The whole place was filled with lots of little coffeehouses where for the price of a shot of instant caffeine expresso (then the exotic drink of choice for the hip avoiding Maxwell House or whatever regular store-bought coffees were around then) and maybe some ill-thought of pastry or sandwich one could spent the evening listening to the next big thing in folk music which was producing the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan ( a little later), Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band (including later solo artists Geoff and Maria Muldaur), Josh White, Jr., Eric Von Schmidt, and a host of others who all passed through one of the meccas trying to draw a fan base. Most of the names of the clubs are now forgotten although The Idler and Blue Parrot still ring a bell but the beauty of the concept, the absolute beauty was that a poor high school or college student could take a like-minded date (and there were plenty of folkie women around even in high school at one point all trying to emulate Joan Baez’s ironed long hair to, well, to impress the boys who were infatuated with Ms. Baez and her exotic look) on the cheap and still maybe “scoring,” whatever that might have entailed and not always hopping into bed, although that was the plan for most guys I assume. I know it was for me.

So like I said I was washed clean by the folk minute, wash cleaned by the coffeehouse scene, and washed clean by the whole folk ethos and remain so even today. And today is what I want to talk about. That pure searching for roots folk minute did not survive Dylan going electric, the British invasion and the musical trends that I mentioned earlier but that was hardly the end of the story since a cohort of people continued to and continue to support that folk minute idea, especially the laid-back coffeehouse idea. Funny and maybe this is a sociological observation or a psychological observation or something but there might be some truth in it. I remember as a kid in the 1950s always rebelling against my parents’ music the music of the big band era in the late 1930s and 1940s (the Duke, the Count, Harry James, Jimmy and Tommy Dorey and so on, groups like the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, the Andrews Sisters, and individual artists like Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and Vaughn Monroe) that got them through the Great Depression and the anxieties of World War II. Music that formed their youth and which they stayed with not branching out much throughout their lives. I am noticing, and not just in my own case, but I will use that as the example here, that I tend to favor the music that formed my musical tastes in my youth-now classic (ouch!) rock and roll, blues and folk pretty much in that order. And others have too, specifically this folk music.

And so in some areas of the country, and Boston is one of them (although not so much Cambridge as in the old days except that Club Passim I mentioned earlier), there is an on-going if not exactly thriving folk scene centered on the demographic who came of age with the music (and a source of concern as baby-boomers die off and are not replaced in the ranks by the young). Now I mentioned that the coffeehouse idea is still alive. But not like in the old days where there was one on every block (not really, but a lot) and each place seemed to be busy every night. The economics of running such a venture preclude running coffeehouse as businesses (even Passim over the last period had been a non-profit organization dependent on grants, memberships and constant concerts in that small space). Now the coffeehouse scene is centered on the churches, mainly, who open their doors maybe once or twice a month for a weekend folk concert (complete with coffee and other refreshments as well). And the king hell leader of the pack in opening their doors, and hence the reference in the title, are the U-U churches in the area (Universalist-Unitarian who merged to survive many years ago but still keep their doctrinal differences for one and all to inspect). I would say that a great majority of folk events I have attended over the past several years certainly in the New England (where U-U-dom is strongest) are those simple churches. And so one can expect the hall to be setup with folding chairs, a simple stage, a sound system worked by some volunteer magic techie, the inevitable coffee and pastry, some flyers for upcoming events, an MC who has been around since whenever the coffeehouse started and some usually very good local talent. Occasionally an “open mic” for the brave or those who are nursing their act will fill in part of the program. That open mic democratic music idea is that you have a feature artist or two for an hour and the rest of the time brave souls go up and each play one or two songs for the rest of the program . Well it ain’t Dylan-Baez-Rush-Paxton-Kweskin-VonRonk-incarnate but it does keep this important segment of the American songbook alive. All of this mainly attended by AARP-ready patrons. So if somebody asks you, at least in New England, whether there is folk music around now you know where to direct them for a start. Hats Off To The U-U (and other) Coffeehouses      

***Channeling Doctor Gonzo- Hunter Thompson’s Where The Buffalo Roam  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Where The Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray, Peter Boyle,   

Frank Jackman thought it was ironic how many times that he had been investigating for pieces that he wanted to write kind of came full circle. You know checking something out in one context and then having that same thing turn up in another. Like when you are thinking about a word or a song and a couple of days later they turn up in the newspaper or on the radio. Stuff like that. Frank had recently finished a sketch about the old days in his neighborhood of North Adamsville (that’s in Massachusetts) where he used to have a growing up love/hate relationship with the biker scene, you know hard ass, hard living motorcycle guys out of the Hell’s Angels mode who wreaked havoc around his town. He liked their outlawry, their rebellion but was ultimately repelled by their savage destructiveness and nihilism (to speak nothing of the fact that he could not handle the power of a serious bike like an Indian or a Harley).

Of course any serious investigation into the notorious biker scene back in the 1960s when they were seen as just a little less dangerous that the red menace coming out of the Soviet Union and its fellow-travelers here then had to include a perusal of the late Doctor Hunter Thompson’s in-depth rather definitive journalistic study, Hell’s Angels, which included getting very up close and personal with a few of the dudes. The ironic part came later when a friend of his, Peter Markin, whom he had met in San Francisco back in the  1967 summer of love days there called him up, or sent him an e-mail, he couldn’t remember which asking Frank to go over to his Cambridge digs and talk about the old days in the 1960s when revolution was in the air, when the two of them had been part of a mass movement to “turn the world upside down,” and had been defeated by the dead-enders who had all the guns, the prisons, the legal system, the governmental power, and used them to the fullest to thwart that search for a “newer world.” Both recognized that defeat, whether one called it a political defeat like Frank did or like Peter  a military defeat, led to what is now a forty plus year rearguard action against the bastards who took over and have made those kindred angels pay dearly for their hubris.

One of the “parlor games” that Frank and Peter had played over the years was to date the time when the bubble burst on the counter-culture’s efforts to bring forth that newer world although their theories are not germane here. What is germane in this mix though is that earlier Hunter Thompson reference. See not only did Hunter write serious and humorous, jabbing humorous, words about the Hell’s Angels but he was a moving force via the start-up Rolling Stone magazine behind the “new journalism,” behind what became known later when time came for naming such things, “gonzo” journalism, and hence his moniker of Doctor Gonzo. To kind of wrap things together here, to make the irony, Frank after reading what Thompson had to say about bikers as was his way when something appealed to him read everything he could get his hands on by the man and Hunter became something of a muse, a now long gone lamented muse. Although they were a million miles apart politically Frank enjoyed reading Hunter’s stuff for some general insights into the absurdities of bourgeois culture by a man who definitely knew how to skewer his victims. Relished it in fact. And that brings us full circle because one night, not the first night that Frank and Peter started cutting up touches about old days but later, Peter had ordered a copy of the Hunter Thompson-centered Where The Buffalo Roam to spark some memories of the times and the man.                  

While there is no need to discuss Markin’s or Jackman’s views on when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed Thompson’s is important, at least according to Frank, since one of the episodes in that semi-autobiographical film sketch, part true, part fiction deals with the 1972 presidential campaign where one Richard M. Nixon, sitting President of the United States swamped his opponent, Senator George McGovern, swamped him without regard to all the illegal activity he commanded in his efforts to win. This is Hunter’s ebb point, the point where the downhill slide worked its way down further. So it is no accident that the period which the film covers is between 1968 when all hell broke out here in America with the Chicago police riots in the summer of 1968 at the Democratic National Convention, broke out in Europe with the May Days in Paris, and most importantly broke out in Vietnam where the heroic DNV/NLF troops rained hell on everybody with the Tet offensive that signaled that the Vietnam war was unwinnable and the ebb 1972. This is also the period when Thompson made his mark as a gonzo journalist (again mostly through his hot and cold relationship with the management of Rolling Stone), perfected his skills as an active part of the stories he was covering.   

Obviously when a journalist is living out in edge city, when his whole illegal life-style (illegal not just in the technical sense of violating various drug laws, and other high crimes and misdemeanors but illegal as a model for behavior which those dead-enders hated even worse than the drugs and a life-style which if copied would create quite a sea-change) is on display in public, as a public actor the line between fact and fiction best be blurred. Deniability becomes the beginning of wisdom so it was never clear in his books, or in this film where fact and fiction worked out.  Most of the episodes in this loosely plotted film have a half-life in something that he wrote like the Democratic National Convention of 1972, Super Bowl 1972, and the like.

The central device used in the film is a flashback by mad monk Hunter now ensconced in in cozy Woody Creek (where the buffalo roam, or did) trying to meet another frenzied magazine dead-line, an article about his lawyer/comrade/soul-mate and kindred mad monk hell-raiser Carlos Lazlo. Lazlo whose whereabouts at the time of writing are unknown, although he is presumed dead, probably either by some  drug cartel or some third world security agency who did not like the idea of a revolution in their country by a certified mad monk. But all of that is speculation. What is not speculation is Hunter’s detailing of their friendship from Lazlo’s use of his legal education to fight for the “newer day” defending street kids being busted for personal dope use which wound up costing Lazlo his license to practice and his freedom and to the trip that would become the novel Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas to the Super Bowl story to the 1972 presidential story to his going over the edge, going to a place Hunter now endowed with celebrity did not, or could not, go. In the end Hunter missed the brown buffalo, just like in the end Frank Jackman missed his muse, warts and all. 

When The World, Our World, Was Young- The Night of The Howl

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

Several years ago when the literary world, and not just the literary world, was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road  there were a plethora of books and articles about the meaning of it all, about the place of the book, and of the author, in the American literary pantheon. Any number of writers, who knew, or maybe had been influenced by Kerouac chimed in about subjects related to the book from the origins of each individual episode in that “beat” travelogue to the various literary tropes that Jack used in his writing (you know “the holy fool,” the goof, the zen master wisdom king, Catholic notions of salvation, urban rootlessness, perennial wanderlust, and so on). Others took a different tact and spoke to the meaning of the book for their psychological well-being by having emulated the trappings of what Sal/Jack, Dean/Neal, Irwin/Allen, Bull/William did, or did not, do for them on their individual searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Took time to express what being on the open road the first time, smoking their first dope smoke, having their first bouts with loose sex meant. Maybe telling about the travails of the road too, the dusty back road bus stations, sleeping out along the side of some wayward Iowa cornfield waiting for dawn to start again on the hitchhike road, being left off in the middle of nowhere by some trucker who was heading south when you were heading west, the endlessly poor diet either from on the run quick meal foods to truckers’ diner fare. All taken in stride, all missed, all nostalgia missed, wouldn’t it be great to do again except now I have that house, that spouse, those kids, that looming college tuition crisis to content with and so the search for that American night dropped off the radar.               

Others rather than writing about what On The Road meant personally, socially, as literature wrote their own quirky little pieces that reflected the heat from Jack’s sun. One such writer, or rather a guy who liked to write since his main professions in life were elsewhere, was Peter Paul Markin who wrote his own version of the beat travelogue to the tune of his generation, the generation after Kerouac’s “beats,” the generation of ‘68,  the “hippies” to give them a known name if not entirely accurate to describe the whole scene just as “beat” does not reflect that whole of that previous scene, obviously influenced by Kerouac entitled Ancient dreams, dreamed which met with some small success in 2009. In order to commemorate the 5^th anniversary of the publication of that effort, that series of sketches as Markin himself put it I here will give forth to all and sundry on the real meaning or that short work:   

It is hard to not be overcome by the hard fact that Peter Paul Markin’s  (hereafter Markin) efforts to try to find some life lessons in Ancient dreams, dreamed  were driven by sex, or really what to do about the opposite sex in his life. We can all use a primer, any help at all, male or female, in that struggle but one should be first be struck by how early on that male-female thing as the core  of existence played a role in his sketches. For example in the very first sketch Markin goes on and on about a certain Miss Cora from the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice who twisted a drifter named Frank around her finger so bad he couldn’t see straight, went to his big step-off with a smile after he amateurishly helped her get rid of her low-rent, no go husband and botched it as bad as a man could, no, went to that big step-off after she set him up for the fall all by his lonesome with a half-smile on his face (Jesus, Markin has got me going now with that smile/ half-smile bull he kept yakking about). He absorbed those lessons unto he fifth degree. But get this he, Markin claims, claims as he said this to me on a stack of bibles or something that he had “seen” the movie while in his mother’s womb and tried to warn Frank off Miss Cora. Claims that in 1946 he learned all there was to learn about woman and their wanting habits by just “seeing” that film. Hey, rather than me getting all cranky and upset about being put on by him let Frank tell it his way, or the way he had his narrator tell it since that guy knew Frank before the end and you can decide:

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman. That frail, frill business a throwback to my spending too much time in childhood reading those serious crime novels by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler all curled up in some bed at night wondering, wondering in silence whether I had the stuff, the stuff of dreams. Maybe watching too many Saturday matinee 1930s gangster and slick Sam Spade hard-boiled detective movies at the revival Strand Theater where I used to sneak into from the back door up into the balcony.  Wondering watching those films whether I was going to be another joe on that lost highway Hank always talked about, just a guy who kept his nose clean and didn’t make waves. Well I sure as hell did make some waves and have paid the price but that is my story. Today I’ve got Frank’s story to tell, my buddy Frank Dawson who I met in here and was as white a guy as you could ever meet, except when he got on the scent of a woman. At least that is how the newspapers told the story before he told it to me nice and personal, the real story, that perfume scent that drove him over the edge.

See Frank, when it came right down to it was no different from me, maybe that’s why we got along alright in tight quarters, because he wanted to make a big splash, make waves unlike his old man who drained his life away working some dustbowl farm. Well Frank sure as hell did. Except for me it was always about the business first, you know getting a haul from some sweet virgin bank where all the kale, you know dough, was stashed away just waiting for guys like me to pounce on it. Frank whatever larceny he had in his heart though always mixed up that with some woman thing, some scent of a woman thing that will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tied a guy up, a guy like Frank Dawson, a rolling stone from out in the sticks somewhere who headed, or maybe landed is better here in California and really thought he was going to make the garden of Eden out of his small life. Like I said he got twisted so bad, so bad that like some other guys I knew, not good guys like Frank but some mean bracero hombres who would cut you up with some hidden “shiv,” a blade, as easy as look at you, that he went to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly squeezing him. That is he would not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.

Here’s the funny part and you know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, Frank went to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around that frail, frill, twist, dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all, six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that smile, ah, half-smile as they led him away. Yah, guys just like Frank. Let me explain what I mean, okay.

 

Frank Dawson had it bad. [But you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua Lawrence Breslins, guys who I hung around with and had dough dreams too, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less, other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it as bad as a man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door. (He always called her Miss Cora although she was married, married as could be, I wonder if he called her Miss Cora when they were under the satin sheets naked as jaybirds and her showing him a trick or two to curl his toes, I never asked him though). That café door was the entrance from the back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, hell greasy spoon, a cup of joe in her hand. Frank said he vividly remembered just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns. That no returns is what I said after I heard the story and was writing stuff down like he asked me to when he wanted the world to know what really happened along the way to the big step-off. He never said such stuff, never put an evil, fateful, spin on things even toward the end. Even when he was ready to meet his maker. Damn.

She breezed in, breezed in like some trade winds, all sugary and sultry, Frank thought later when he tried to explain it to his lawyer, to the judge, to the jury, to some newspaper guy they let interview him who balled the whole thing up , yeah, even to the priest, a Catholic priest, Father Riley, although Frank said he was brought up a pre-destined Baptist and didn’t know half the stuff the priest had been talking about like penance and revelation, who visited him every day toward the end, and to me at night when the lights were out and we would talk and he wanted somebody, a guy like him, to know what drove him and why.

Yeah so he would try to explain everything that had happened and how to anyone who would listen about her breezing in, trade winds breezed he said having once in the service been down in Puerto Rico for bomb practice when he was on a Navy ship although this was the wrong coast for that kind of wind but I got what he meant, had had a couple of breezes like that myself but I like I said I didn’t mix business with pleasure. Made that a rule early on when I almost got clipped by a woman who had big wanting habits, I was daffy about, she tried to make me press my luck by trying to pull another robbery of the same place which was insane so she and I could go to Europe, or something like that. It was only by the skin of our necks that we pulled the job off but one of the guys on the job with got sent to the pearly gates when the security guard figured out quicker than the first time that the joint was going to be hit, hit hard and sang his rooty-toot-toot song. After that never again.

So there she was in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along, with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned, lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that Frank had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out. Jesus even I got weepy when he said that.  

I might as well tell you, just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me toward the end like I was some father-confessor, and maybe I was, a real father confessor being a few years older, having been here longer, and not talking about penance and salvation but just trying to keep the story straight, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it did play out. Not at all. No way. Frank could have just turned around anytime he said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late regret. I know and you now will know how I know that he would call out her name at night, maybe a two o’clock when it was real dark and the turnkey was off in the guard room sleeping some drunk off, call out her name and, giggly like a schoolboy, telling her to stop this and stop that, giggly like I said, and then called her sweetly, like she was some girl next door virgin all pure and all, his sweet baby whore. Yeah, now that I think about it he was blowing wind, maybe that trade wind stuff all sugary and sultry. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into damn overdrive like our boy Frank.

Listen up a little and see if you think Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon.  (A lot of guys after the war had a hard time settling down just drifting around, coming out here from the East looking for something, finding land’s end and I don’t know surf boards, or hot rods, or drug smuggling I don’t know since I was born here and like I said my trade was robbing banks where the dough was, that was my kicks) He was just stumbling, like he said, from one half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines working on everything from a bicycle to a battleship he would laugh) in some flop garage for a week here when the regular guy was on vacation or something, drifting, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed by me that part of the story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a bad dream.

Guys would show up later at trial trying to get in on the action and claim that they saw Frank cut a guy, maybe more than one guy, you never know with winos and jack-rollers, and leave him, or them, for dead but the deeds never involved women so I agreed with Frank they were just conning for something. The judge never let them get too far before tossing them off the stand. The prosecution was just pig-piling the evidence to see what would stick with the jury to show Frank was some hardened criminal from the get-go not a love-bit guy or just another hard luck story out of the Great Depression times.       

 

Hell, the way he was going, after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre gringo ass bosses standing over his sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.

Here is where luck is kind of funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because, for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and a moon pie. Instead he just grabbed a pack of Luckies, unfiltered cigarettes but a step up from the rolling Bull Durham that he had survived on before he got paid off on that bracero labor job and headed toward the café. That smell just got the better of him.  So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open. And then she walked through the damn cheapjack door.                 

She may have been just another blonde, a very blonde frail, maybe with a slight pair of round heels and heading toward a robust thirty or so just serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint along with her husband as he found out a few minutes later, too late, but from second one when his eyes eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.

What he should have asked, and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast Podunk, really just south of Santa Barbara, when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana hair.      

And she did. Story number one was the “serve them off the platter” hubby, Manny, short-ordering behind the grill in that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change somebody, including his Cora. Wouldn’t buy her the trinkets that every woman loved so she, since he could hardly add for all his cheapness and she handled the books, just took what she wanted when she wanted it and he was never the wiser. (Guys, including Manny were like that with Cora, will always be like that with the Coras of the world so Frank wasn’t alone he just got skirt-addled more than most guys who maybe had better radar to avoid that trouble coming through the door.)  Story number two, and go figure,  said hubby didn’t care one way or the other about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis Club down the road drunk as a skunk nights. She loathed Manny at those times, times when to get a laugh for the boys, maybe inflame them too, he would paw her like some dumb pet. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Doped up to stop the pain of her life, tricked up to pay for the dope, and none too choosey about who did what to her as long as they brought a needle and a spoon. And they did until she crossed some low-life in Westminster and he threw her out to beg for herself. Story number four, the one that would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be “grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.

Markin Interlude One:  “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen in the old Orpheum Theater up in Adamsville Square when my mother was “carrying” me once I saw her coming through that door for him, for Frank,  to get the hell out of there at that moment. I saw that come hither look that is embedded in their womanly DNA she threw at him and I saw him buckle, buckle under foot, with his eyes all glued to her walk also embedded in his manly DNA (what did we know of such things, embedded or not, then Frank just called it a breeze, some kind of breeze like he could have stopped the thing in its tracks).This dame was poison, no question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented eyes for a minute, forget about ocean breezes or desert-addled and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell, just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have to, get your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”

But here is where fate works against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned back to look at Frank with those languid  eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice  “Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought that  fresh deck of Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of the convenient pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a Lucky cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank, lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except for two in the morning murmur dreams, and that final half-smile.   

Peter Paul Markin Interlude Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank, not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there was no crying there.”

Here is what is strange, and while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed, the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A. gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.

Even with all of that Frank still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school “crush” sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.            

He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute, although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from those white shorts Manny was done for. And once Frank had sealed his fate (and hers too) on that midnight  roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact. Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap- jack little heart he too knew he was done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.  

The way Frank told it even I knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board  in order to get a full glance at Cora and try his “line” on her knew it (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for business and harmless, and maybe it was with them). Knew it the minute he sat at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on that run.

Damn, any dated –up teen-age joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock (and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts, asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so he could take a shot at Cora himself.  

Hell even the California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed  in one of the rooms over the garage that things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock at.

Look I am strictly a money guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never after that one time early on got messed up with some screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending money time later. And maybe if I had gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop was present too.  Then he /they could have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.

I am almost too embarrassed, almost too embarrassed since Frank is not here to defend himself, maybe he could have given us an inkling of what he was thinking about at the time, if he was thinking of anything but those pillow dreams, to detail how badly these two amateurs gummed up the job every which way. (I already know what she, Miss Cora, was thinking, had her sized up the minute Frank mentioned who he was and who she was, mentioned those white shorts and that short order husband). Yeah, they gummed it up so that even a detective novel writer would turn blush red with shame. Yeah somebody like Dashiell Hammett, a guy who knew how to plot out the murders, how to raise holy hell in Red Harvest times would blush to think that they could do the “perfect” murder with their skinny sense of how to do criminal things. Hell, trying poison and the off the cliff with the car routine like a thousand guys have done before-and always got caught. The old brakes giving out and over the hill crashing and Frank an A-One mechanic even some silly skirt-addled highway motorcycle cop could figure given some time.      

I tried to tell Frank this but he was only half-listening, only wanted to tell his story mostly but I guess I am trying to make sense of the deal for anybody who might read this, maybe wise you up if you are thinking about doing away some Manny or other. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and nothing for amateurs to mess around with. So they tried one thing, something with poison taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it didn’t take. Then another, they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they planned and wound up with the old gag that the cops have been wise to since about 1906, got him drunk, conked him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car over the cliff after Frank messed with the brakes. Jesus, double jesus.  

Peter Paul Interlude Three: “Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest caper she’s setting you up. Think-who drove the car, who got the whiskey at the liquor store down the road, who knew how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny?  And she sitting at home waiting for her husband and his mechanic to come home after a toot. Why don’t you just paint a big target on your chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams. You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that skirt-crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”  

If you want the details, want to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall editions of the Los Angeles Gazette. They covered the story big time, and the trial too. See how on the stand she lied her ass off about the child she was carrying being Manny’s and what was she to do now with a child to bring up alone. Lied about how Frank made advances toward her which she rebuffed. Even had a couple of Manny’s drinking buddies get on the stand and tell how Manny encouraged them to go so far with Miss Cora, pinching her behind, maybe a kiss on the cheek but Manny made very clear no further. And Manny told them he told Frank that same thing. And the most beautiful part of the whole thing, the thing that made Miss Cora a real femme fatale in my book was that the whole affair at her urging was kept very secret no matter what customers, the good old boy truckers, the young college kids might think so there was not tangible evidence to proof they had been together all those weeks and months. That’s just the details though. I can give you the finish, the last moments now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah, Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all the way to the end. Do you need to know more?      

***In The Time Of The 1930s Cuban Revolution-Jennifer Jones and John Garfield’s We Were Strangers   

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

We Were Strangers, Jennifer Jones, John Garfield, Columbia Pictures, 1949

The history of Cuba had been replete with struggles against tyranny well before the boys of the Sierra Madres, you know the Castro Brothers, beloved Che the Argentine internationalist heart of the revolution, the lost Frank Paisa man of the cities, and all their brethren who took down Batista in the late 1950s. Took him down almost without a fight at the end when the masses waited in the cities and farms for the boys (and girls, don’t forget Haydee Santamaria) to work their way to Havana town. Of course everybody remembers, or should, the legendary 19^th century revolutionary Jose Marti, celebrated in story and song, still honored in Cuba today and his struggle to get rid of the bloody Spanish oppressors and the later struggle in the 1930s against the hyenas, the Machado, the hyenas who were replaced later by the that self-same Batista. So the island of Cuba has been no stranger to the struggle for freedom (and the Bay of Pigs-style operations to thwart such struggles) the film under review, We Were Strangers, demonstrates in its depiction of the fight against the hyenas in the 1930s mentioned above. Of course this film which was released in 1949 could not have dealt with the regime that followed, Batista’s, since this film is centered on the 1930s struggles. That later regime necessitated the Castro boys taking up arms in the hills after the initial defeat at Moncado.        

Here is the skinny. The hyenas took over in the 1920s and ran rampart over the country and for the foreign, mainly the United States, interests in the sugar production. (Cuba was a classic monoculture colonial and semi-colonial country around the sugar crop, and to a lesser extent still is). The younger generation of professionals and a smattering of workers and peasants decided that they had had enough and as was the norm in that day, and not just in Cuba, created underground revolutionary organizations in order to overthrow the strongman. A familiar enough story particularly in the 20th century.

And so the young upstarts and old freedom-lovers created an organization and devised some ideas about how they could overthrow the regime. But then they ran up against the problem every revolutionary organization faces in times of serious oppression, the passivity or resignation of the masses. The question for such organizations then becomes what to do-wait until the masses are so oppressed they will rise on their own or to nudge the masses into activity by an exemplary action aimed at the heart of the regime. Well our boys, most of them, opted for not waiting, for action now.

Of course that decision entailed making a plan to create the biggest splash possible and to a great extent the core of this film centers on the creation of that splash promoted by an angry young revolutionary who had been in exile for a while (his father had fled Cuba after some problems which caused Fenner (played by John Garfield) endless shame and a need to bring back to his family name. The gist of the plan, seemingly foolproof, was to kill some well-known top governmental official and then set a massive explosion at his funeral which was sure to be attended by the president and the major players in government. Wipe them out at one blow and set the masses in motion for their freedom. Maybe in a cakewalk. By hook or by crook the group that Fenner recruits to do the preparation and digging of a tunnel underneath the graveside complete their work under tremendous pressure. The target (a Senate President) is duly killed and… Well, and the guy in NOT to be buried where he was supposed to be. Scratch Plan A, plan B is to get Fenner out of the country but he is subject to a wide scale manhunt and is finally cornered and killed after a heroic individual struggle not to be taken alive. Shortly thereafter the freedom forces do overthrow the hyenas and set up the next level of struggle in Cuban history.              

Oh yeah, this is a Hollywood production after all, a 1940s production and there naturally has to be some romantic interest to keep the action from being too tedious. So enter China (played by Jennifer Jones), the sister of a fallen revolutionary who is intimately involved in the plan, and gets intimately involved with Fenner (1940s intimately film involved). That involvements shifts both their motivations slightly as they now want to struggle so that they can raise a family in freedom, not an unworthy motive, no question. But also one where a certain softness set in which the security forces were able to exploit in order to corner Fenner. China was let to speak his eulogy, to write his epitaph in the then new Cuba.  Fenner died heroically but if any cautionary tale is to be taken from this film then it is once again that isolated revolutionary action in lieu of mass struggle is ultimately futile. That wisdom would surely be at the top of the list.

 

 

***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In The Time Of The Hard Motorcycle Boys-With Kudos To Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman     

 Several years ago I was trying to finally reconcile myself, after many false starts, un-kept makings-up, and bewildering events that would take me back to square one in that effort, with the hard upbringing I had had in my old working-class town of North Adamsville south of Boston. Hard economically since we were the poorest of the poor, the marginally working at a place where that group met the lumpen elements, literally met the jack-rollers, drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters (night sneak thieves for the unknowing), and other riffraff who preyed not on the rich, or even the middle-class up the road but the closest targets, the easy targets, the working poor, us. Hard too, hard to not understand why those outrageous wanting habits (for a room of my own, for a typewriter, for when I came of age a car, for, well, you get the idea, wanting habits) could never be satisfied and when I squawked about it as I did, did squawk there is no other way to put it, all hell came raining down on my head from my mother, mainly. So it took a long while to not cringe every time I tried once I got out from under to make my peace with the old neighborhood, with that wanting habit business (wanting habits still there), with my family or what was left of it after I finally reconciled myself to certain facts that some things in this world are not going to be explained, maybe can’t.

One of the helpful tips I got from a gal who had gone through her own wanting habits childhood was by talking about some of the old neighborhood things I remembered from those days. One time I happened to mention to some new friends that in high school in the early 1960s I had been drawn to and repulsed by the hard ass motorcycle guys from Boston. Guys, white guys, who called themselves the Devil’s Disciplines from around Dorchester, who roamed at will through the streets of our town to get to Adamsville Beach. That beach the nearest point to the ocean in the area and also complete with plenty secluded parking areas and a magnet for good-looking young women (high school girls mainly) who spent their daytime summer hours sunning themselves in order to looked well-tanned when the night time was the right time. And you can figure out what the right time and what was done in that right time yourselves. Naturally I, and sometimes some guy friends, car-less would sit on the seawall and see what was what. These friends I mentioned that romance of the bike to, a couple of them from working class neighborhoods themselves, looked at me askance when I said that I had been drawn to outlaw motorcycle guys what with their reputation for murder, mayhem, drugs, mayhem, or did I say that already. Looked leery at me a guy who has spent his life arguing against the degradation of human life and those who would treat it as cheaply as those outlaws seemed to do. And was not exactly a poster boy for Harley-Davidson.   

Of course that later wisdom was gathered after the initial romance of the outlaw that exploded in straight-laced red scare Cold War America wore off but early on I could have gone that way if I had been a little tougher, no, a lot tougher. Oh yeah, and could do anything, except for once, do anything besides ride on the back seat of a bike. See that beach was a local rendezvous for bikers, babes, and watching “submarine races” after midnight. Not all of those three things came together and maybe none together depending on who was down there any given night. Who meaning what young women, and what kind, were drawn to that locale when those guys, sometimes in two by  two formation sometimes four depending how confrontational they wanted to be with the cops and the square citizenry, with their chrome-infested bikes came to a stop. It was also the place where poor ass corner boys with no bikes but also with no cars, not even a clunker (are you kidding we half the time did not have the wherewithal for a “father car” much less for some kid to go cruising looking for the heart of Saturday night) sat stone-faced on the seawall that protected the boulevard from the furies of Mother Nature when she decided to give humankind a lesson, a good dunking. Sat stone-faced wondering what would happen if, for once, I had access to a chopper and one of girls from notorious Five Point ready to do my bidding. Those Five Point girls were known, high school known, at least from that Monday morning before school boy and girl restroom talk, to be happy to accommodate those love-starved bikers, and at least one, Marie, was according to an old girlfriend of mind who heard the talk in that Monday morning lounge, ready for more, ready to turn up a guy’s toes, maybe, more than one, guy not toes. So that was one of the “drawn to” parts. Especially when they came in formation scaring the citizenry, no cops to be found with a mile of the beach, and the girls looked lustily their way.       

But that girl longing stuff was eternal, whether bikers existed in the universe or not. Eternal out in front of corner boy hang-out Salducci’s Pizza Parlor trying to cadge some time with girls going in for an evening slice of pizza and soda (if a girl ordered onions on top, I, we, would know to forget her that night because she had already determined not a damn thing was going to happen, that night, and we constantly worked for the minute on this subject, or earlier in junior out in front of Doc’s Drugstore waiting for the girls to go inside and spend their nickels, dimes and quarters playing the jukebox on songs they (we) heard on American Bandstand and could not get enough of, or at some woe begotten school dance hoping for that last chance last dance with that girl you have made your eyes sore over, or maybe just in the corridor checking out some girl with that furtive glance that we had worked into a science.

The “drawn to” part of the motorcycle guys for me really was that they were “cool,” outlaw guys with those big motorcycles blazing and I fancied myself a rebel. These guys could give a f- - k if school kept or not (just an expression since most of these guys from what I heard had dropped out of school or if they stayed in school then they were over at Boston Trade working the kinks out of some motor problem, or grabbing school property shop stuff to sell to get gas money together. While my form of alienation was totally different from theirs, or I liked to think that, they were nonplussed by the trappings of bourgeois society circa 1960. Made their own society, kept their own counsel, had no fear of the cops, had no fear of dying when I talked to one guy once who told me “jail or the streets it don’t make no different to me as long as I have my dope, my woman, and my hog when I am on the streets. Oh yeah, and they show the “colors” when my time comes, and I don’t care when that is.” Cool. Existential philosophers, even old brother Jean Genet a true outlaw himself, pouring out a torrent of words could not express the plight of the modern mass man who has fallen through the cracks in the post-World War II golden age better that that doomed biker. Of course that is me later rationalizing my attraction, then it was just guys who got lots respect, no, better, fear by just stepping on the clutch. Got even more fearsome in my eyes when I found out that a couple of guys from my street, tough guys in their own right and who had allegedly committed a couple of armed robberies of local gas stations to get their bikes, were rejected by the Boston guys, the Disciples, for being “pussies.” Jesus.          

Yeah so for a while the outlaws had me in thrall. Then the “repulsed by” part came in, the part where they had no rules at all. One night, a summer night, hot, sweaty (at least it must have been humid because I was sweaty), sultry, a night with no good omens to recommend it about a dozen  Disciples rode in formation to the beginning the beach, the area where during the day the local families would bring the kids, maybe have a picnic, a barbecue, and would leave plenty of trash in the trash barrels stopped and began to systematically light the barrels on fire, and then started tearing the benches and picnic tables apart and throwing the wood on the fires. The cops came about an hour later after the fires had flamed out.  Worse they would, not that night as far as I know since they seemed to be intent on pure destruction, pick on regular guys sitting in their cars (or their father-borrowed car) trying to “make” their dates (and hassle those dates too with ugly language and gestures which appalled most of them). Here is the kicker though they thought nothing of beating up guys for just looking the wrong way at them. And that is not just filler for this story but based on personal experience. One night I was pissed off at something, probably some beef with Ma, or maybe just pissed off to be pissed of like I was a lot of time in those days. And most of the times when I was pissed off I would head to Adamsville Beach. Walking, of course, it wasn’t far, maybe a mile or so from the house. And wound up sitting alone down at the biker end of the beach. And get this just kind of staring absent-mindedly in the bikers’ direction. Well one guy, a tall, thin guy with a chip on his shoulder (but I only though of that later) came over to me and asked why I was looking at him, or his girl. I said as I stood up to try to explain I wasn’t looking at anybody or anything but thinking about stuff because I was pissed off. He didn’t like that answer because then without warning or another word he kicked me in the groin and walked away saying “if you are pissed off don’t come here and bother me, got that?” Yeah, I got it. Got it about fifteen minutes later when the pain finally subsided. In the end I feared them more than saw them as heroic figures, but still that was a close thing.

Fast forward.

A couple of years ago, now like I said generally reconciled with my roots, I got in contact with the reunion committee for my class at North Adamsville which after the 40^th anniversary reunion had put together a website for classmates to communicate through. One of the sections on the site was for interactive messages about whatever subject came into your head. I had just seen, or seen again, the classic 1950s motorcycle film, Marlon Brando’s The Wild Ones, and the generational, our generation, our generation of ’68 “hippie” free as the wind classic, Easy Ride. So I was hopped up to ask a question about motorcycles, about what people had to say about them. But I put the question a little differently from that straight motorcycle talk because I was, once again, in thrall to that old biker time experience (forgetting that kick in groin).

The way I posed the question since I had an answer already in mind was asking about what classmates thought was the classic working-class love song, the song that would “speak” to those old times. Now North Adamsville was in those days a classic working-class suburb dependent on factory and service jobs although there were pockets of middle-class-dom as pictured in the glossy magazines so not everybody from school would gravitate to the idea of the classic working class song. But enough would to make the question worth asking. Moreover I was looking for something that might speak to our working-class roots as well as the intricacies of the working-class love ritual which I really believed (and still believe) is a different gradient than the middle-class ritual. And so I motivated my question by presenting my answer alongside. Here is what I had to say:                 

 

Okay here is the book of genesis, the motorcycle book of genesis, or at least my motorcycle book of genesis which drives my choice of great working-class love song, Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black  Lightning. But, before I get all that let me make about seventy–six disclaimers. First, the whys and wherefores of the motorcycle culture, except on those occasions when they become subject to governmental investigation or impact some cultural phenomena, is outside the purview of the leftist politics that have dominated my life. There is no abstract leftist political line, as a rule, on such activity, nor should there be. (Some of my best friends are bikers, okay, will that hold you.) Those exceptions include when motorcyclists, usually under the rubric of “bad actor” motorcycle clubs, like the famous (or infamous) Oakland, California-based Hell’s Angels are generally harassed by the cops and we have to defend their right to be left alone (you know, those "helmet laws", and the never-failing pull-over for "driving while being a biker") or, like, going the other way, since they are not brethren when the Angels were used by the Rolling Stones at Altamont and that ill-advised decision represented a watershed in the 1960s counter-cultural movement. Decisive some say and we have been fighting a rear-guard action ever since. Or, more ominously, from another angle, when such lumpen formations form the core hell-raisers of anti-immigrant, anti-socialist,   anti-gay, anti-women, anti-black liberation fascistic demonstrations and we are compelled, and rightly so, to go toe to toe with them. Scary yes, necessary yes, bikes or no bikes.

 

Second, in the interest of full disclosure I own no stock, or have any other interest, in Harley-Davidson, or any other motorcycle company. Third, I do not now, or have I ever belonged to a motorcycle club or owned a motorcycle, although I have driven them, or, more often, on back of them on occasion. Fourth, I do not now, knowingly or unknowingly, although I grew up in a working- class neighborhood like you did where bikes and bikers were plentiful, hang with such types. Fifth, the damn things and their riders are too noisy, despite the glamour and “freedom of the road” associated with them. Sixth, and here is the “kicker”, I have been, endlessly, fascinated by bikes and bike culture as least since early high school, if not before, and had several friends who “rode.” Well that is not seventy-six but that is enough for disclaimers.

 

Okay, as to genesis, motorcycle genesis. Let’s connect the dots. A couple of years ago, and maybe more, as part of a trip down memory lane, the details of which do not need detain us here, I did a series of articles on various world-shaking, earth-shattering subjects like high school romances, high school hi-jinx, high school dances, high school Saturday nights, and most importantly of all, high school how to impress the girls( or boys, for girls, or whatever sexual combinations fit these days, but you can speak for yourselves, I am standing on this ground). In short, high school sub-culture, American-style, early 1960s branch, although the emphasis there, as it will be here, is on that social phenomena as filtered through the lenses of a working- class town, a seen-better-days- town at that, our growing up wild-like-the-weeds town.

 

One of the subjects worked over in that series was the search, the eternal search I might add, for the great working- class love song. Not the Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel generic mush that could play in Levittown, Shaker Heights or La Jolla as well as Youngstown or Moline. No, a song that, without blushing, we could call our own, our working- class own, one that the middle and upper classes might like but would not put on their dance cards. As my offering to this high-brow debate I offered a song by written by Englishman Richard Thompson (who folkies, and folk rockers, might know from his Fairport Convention days, very good days, by the way), 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. (See lyrics below.) Without belaboring the point the gist of this song is the biker romance, British version, between outlaw biker James and black-leathered, red-headed Molly. Needless to say such a tenuous lumpen existence as James leads to keep himself “biked" cuts short any long term “little white house with picket fence” ending for the pair. And we do not need such a boring finish. For James, after losing the inevitable running battle with the police, on his death bed bequeaths his bike, his precious “Vincent Black Lightning”, to said Molly. His bike, man! His bike! Is there any greater love story, working class love story, around? No, this makes West Side Story lyrics and a whole bunch of other such songs seem like so much cornball nonsense. His bike, man. Wow! Kudos, Brother Richard Thompson (the first name needed as another Thompson, Hunter, Doctor Gonzo, of journalistic legend, cut his teeth on the Hell’s Angels)   

 

Now despite my flawless logic and the worthiness of my choice a few, actually a torrent of comments by fellow classmates followed, after denying that our town was working-class, went on and on about how Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel with the girl falling through the cracks of life to save her guy’s class ring from some speedy train, the Shirelles Leader Of The Pack where the guy, big tough hellish biker, falls apart, goes not gentle into that good night when the girl’s parents told her to drop the dude, even Bruce Springsteen’s Jersey Girl ( I admit Jersey is working class enough once you get away for the New York City orbit) where the guy is trying to piece off his girl with trips to some two-bit amusement park where I guess he figures she will give him whatever he wants if he wins her a kewpie doll all were better choices. Jesus. Well, I grabbed the ticket, I took the ride on that question.    

 

Needless to say that exploration, that haunted question, was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that means going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly relevant “biker” experience. Such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo” journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and other, later Rolling Stone magazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as fate would have it, with the then recent passing of actor/director Dennis Hooper, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film, Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all, tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted, leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of), side-burned, chain-linked wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end really just misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.

 

Okay, we will cut to the chase on the plot. Old Johnny and his fellow “outlaw” motorcycle club members are out for some weekend “kicks” after a hard week’s non-work (as far as we can figure out, work was marginal for many reasons, as Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels noted, to biker existence, the pursue of jack-rolling, armed robbery or grand theft auto careers probably running a little ahead) out in the sunny California small town hinterlands.(They are still heading out there today, the last time I noticed, in the Southern California high desert, places like Twenty-Nine Palms and Joshua Tree.)

 

And naturally, when the boys (and they are all boys here, except for a couple of “mamas”, one spurned by Johnny, in a break-away club led by jack-in-the-box jokester, Lee Marvin as Chino) hit one small town they, naturally, after sizing up the local law, head for the local café (and bar). And once one mentions cafes in small towns in California (or Larry McMurtry’s West Texas, for that matter), then hard-working, trying to make it through the shift, got to get out of this small town and see the world, dreamy-eyed, naïve (yes, naive) sheriff-daughtered young waitress, Kathy, (yes, and hard-working, it’s tough dealing them off the arm in these kind of joints, or elsewhere) Johnny trap comes into play. Okay, now you know, even alienated, misunderstood, misanthropic, cop-hating (an additional obstacle given said waitress’s kinships) boy Johnny needs, needs cinematically at least, to meet a girl who understands him.

 

The development of that young hope, although hopeless, boy meets girl romance relationship, hither and yon, drives the plot. Oh, and along the way the boys, after a few thousand beers, as boys, especially girl-starved biker boys, will, at the drop of a hat start to systematically tear down the town, off-handedly, for fun. Needless to say, staid local burghers (aka “squares”) seeing what amount to them is their worst 1950s “communist” invasion nightmare, complete with murder, mayhem and rapine, (although that “c” word was not used in the film, nor should it have been) are determined to “take back” their little town. A few fights, forages, causalities, fatalities, and forgivenesses later though, still smitten but unquenched and chaste Johnny (and his rowdy crowd) and said waitress part, wistfully. The lesson here, for the kids in the theater audience, is that biker love outside biker-dom is doomed. For the adults, the real audience, the lesson: nip the “terrorists” in the bud (call in the state cops, the national guard, the militia, the 82nd Airborne, The Strategic Air Command, NATO, hell, even the “weren't we buddies in the war” Red Army , but nip it, fast when they come roaming through Amityville, Archer City, or your small town).

 

After that summary you can see what we are up against. This is pure fantasy Hollywood cautionary tale on a very real 1950s phenomena, “outlaw” biker clubs, mainly in California, but elsewhere as well. Hunter Thompson did yeoman’s work in his Hell’s Angels to “discover” who these guys were and what drove them, beyond drugs, sex, rock and roll (and, yah, murder and mayhem, the California prison system was a “home away from home”). In a sense the “bikers” were the obverse of the boys (again, mainly) whom Tom Wolfe, in many of his early essays, was writing about and who were (a) forming the core of the surfers on the beaches from Malibu to La Jolla and, (b) driving the custom car/hot rod/drive-in centered (later mall-centered) cool, teenage girl–impressing, car craze night in the immediate post-World War II great American Western sunny skies and pleasant dream drift (physically and culturally).

Except those Wolfe guys were the “winners”. The “bikers” were Nelson Algren’s “losers”, the dead-enders who didn’t hit the gold rush, the Dove Linkhorns (aka the Arkies and Okies who in the 1930s populated John Steinbeck’s Joad saga, The Grapes Of Wrath). Not cool, iconic Marlin-Johnny but hell-bend then-Hell Angels leader, Sonny Barger.

And that is why in the end, as beautifully sullen and misunderstood the alienated Johnny was, and as wholesomely rowdy as his gang was before demon rum took over, this was not the real “biker: scene, West or East.

Now I lived, as a teenager, in a really marginally working- poor, neighborhood of North Adamsville that I have previously mentioned was the leavings of those who were moving up in post-war society. That neighborhood was no more than a mile from the central headquarters of Boston's local Hell’s Angels (although they were not called that as I said they were Devil’s Disciples). I got to see these guys up close as they rallied at various spots on our local beach or “ran” through our neighborhood on their way to some crazed action. The leader had all of the charisma of Marlon Brando’s thick leather belt. His face, as did most of the faces, spoke of small-minded cruelties (and old prison pallors) not of misunderstood youth. And their collective prison records (as Hunter Thompson also noted about the Angels) spoke of “high” lumpenism. And that takes us back to the beginning about who, and what, forms one of the core cohorts for a fascist movement in this country, the sons of Sonny Barger. Then we will need to rely on our leftist politics, and other such weapons. But for now bad ass bikler James and his perfect working-class love gesture to his benighted red-headed Molly rule the roost.  

*************

ARTIST: Richard Thompson

TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

Lyrics and Chords

 

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike

A girl could feel special on any such like

Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you

It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952

And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems

Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme

And he pulled her on behind

And down to Box Hill they did ride

 

/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /

/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /

 

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand

But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man

I've fought with the law since I was seventeen

I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine

Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22

And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you

And if fate should break my stride

Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

 

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae

For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery

Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside

Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside

When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left

He was running out of road, he was running out of breath

But he smiled to see her cry

And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

 

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world

Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl

Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do

They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52

He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys

He said I've got no further use for these

I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome

Swooping down from heaven to carry me home

And he gave her one last kiss and died

And he gave her his Vincent to ride