***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.  

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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