Sweet Dreams Of Peace-With The Lyrics Of Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell  

 

A lot of folk music, of what Pete Markin, my late friend and fellow corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in North Adamsville where we came of age, called the folk minute of the early 1960s after it had been blasted out of place, hell back to Clinch Mountain, Black Mountain, or Hard Rock Candy Mountain by the British musical invasion, you know the Beatles and Stones and subsequent acid-etched rock craze, Airplane, Grateful Dead, The Who was mixed up in my mind with all the various political currents of the time. Stuff like when we were kids and wet behind the ears dutifully going down to some basement air-raid shelter on a teacher’s command to wait out the horrid fact of whether we would survive the next few hours of the Russkies had decided that that the jig was up for the world and had unleashed an atomic nightmare on us. Worse when we were short-ordered to take cover under our decrepit desks for the same purpose like that would save us from the hell-fire explosions we knew were coming along with that atomic blast.

 

I made Markin (that is what we all called him early on before in high school our corner boy leader at Jack Slack’s, Frankie Riley dubbed him “The Scribe” for his two thousand arcane facts and his kind of weird ideas which we didn’t, get this, give a rat’s ass about when all we cared about was girls, cars and getting dough for girls and cars) laugh one time when I said I would rather drop my drawers and “moon” the bastard reds if that was to be my last hurrah. Stuff like that red scare business where commies, you know, reds, guys and gals who took dough from Moscow, in gold they said and did everything under the sun to undermine the American way of life back in the golden age of that possibility. Stuff like black civil rights down South that many North Adamsville fathers and mothers were getting all nervous about in all-white North Adamsville because they knew the blacks who lived in Boston not that far away would figure out a way to head to our town and disrupt our way of life. And stuff like social commentary on the way people lived in little boxes all the same, didn’t want to take risk number one to watch out for the other guy and we were happy to keep their heads down and eyes to the ground while guys like Grandfather Ike took care of business for all of us.     

 

Now Markin was, due a lot to the horrible home life he had with his mother carping on him all the time and not letting him breathe breath number one without letting out with some notion that he was going to hell for his sins, escaped a lot to Harvard Square in Cambridge where the local folk scene was centered then in the slew of coffeehouses and cafes where everybody with any pretension to know three chords and a couple of lyrics was holding forth on any given night. So until he came back to earth with the revival of rock and roll, the music that we all really grew up with, with Mick, Keith, John, Paul, Ringo, George and later Grace, Marty, Jim, Jimi, Janis, Davis, Neil and the rest Markin would just because he was Markin go on and on about this folk singer or song or that one.

 

Me, well I could take it or leave it then, and now. Some of the stuff frankly made me grind my teeth, and worse when Markin would shepherd me over to some ill-lit coffeehouse for a sipped cup of coffee and a pastry in order to listen to some old traditional song with about sixty-five verses, or some modern song that had a lot to do with loneliness, angst, the struggle down South and the campaign against nuclear war. Yeah, stuff like that which was only made tolerable by the nice looking girls with long what looked like ironed hair it was so straight who were friendly as long as you knew a couple of the songs and were ready to go on and on about their pedigree. (Markin did yeoman’s work and bailed me out of a couple of tight spots when I was questioned on the subject since he had those two thousand folk facts at the ready that if you can believe this really impressed those girls.)

 

All of these memories hit home recently, summer of 2015, when I was at a conference convened to support and get others to support the recently agreed to the Iran nuclear weapons plan hammered out by the this government and Iran in order to neutralize the nuclear threat from that quarter for a while. One night the entertainment consisted of a group of four local folk-singers (the locale New York City so local folk singers still means the Village) who regaled us with songs from that folk minute I started out mentioning here. Naturally for the crowd the edge was toward the political protest kind of song and in case anybody in the audience had forgotten the lyrics or had been too young to have been washed by that minute they were provided in nice little packets so that everybody as is usually the case with this folk music set can sing along. That is when the lyrics to Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream hit me after I reviewed the words which I had not heard for a long time.    

 

Now the gist of the song is that somehow, someplace, sometime, the leaders of the world presumably pushed hard by the peoples of the world, the little people, the as Markin called them, “the fellaheen” after a Jack Kerouac fashion he took up after reading the Mexican Girl section of his classic buddy travelogue On The Road, agreed to ban weapons and war as the means of solving the on-going disputes in the world. A great idea, no question, although more honored in the breech than the observance. I got to thinking though that since we were at a meeting to push the Iran nuclear agreement forward that this more limited way to deal with the pressing issues was far more likely to be the way to end the damn arms race than to have a United Nations room full of dignitaries signing off on some paper agreement. That got me thinking about how people must have felt, must have been dancing in the streets, when the armistice was signed ending the blood-bath of World War I, when the Russians headed fast-forward into Berlin in Europe World  War II, when in all ignorance they heard the Japanese had surrendered to the atomic bomb in Pacific World War II, when the nuclear test ban treaty was signed, when that last helicopter lifted off from that American Embassy roof-top in Saigon, and a hundred other smaller ends to the horrible wars of the 20^th century now seeping into the 21^st century. Small episodic dances no question, but maybe paving the way. Let’s hope so with this latest possibility. And while I still grind my teeth at the sound of most approaching folk songs and curse Markin for ever introducing me to the genre this song I will gladly join in singing.