In The Family Way-Gary Cooper’s Casanova Brown

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Casanova Brown, starring Gary Cooper, 1944

 

In the modern cinema no social subject matter from transgender issues to various drug additions and family problems is off limits. And whether the issue is done as a serious dramatic effort or as a comedy sketch no one is “shocked” by whatever is on the screen (and if one is then the solution is to avert your eyes, walk out of the theater, or sent the DVD back). Sometimes looking at the old classic black and white romantic comedies movies which were usually done as “feel good” epics and skirted the tough social issue as much as possible you forget that every once in a while they actually dealt with serious subject matter that you would not have thought would have made it pass the producer’s or studio’s chopping block. Take the film under review, the romantic comedy Casanova Brown which is a slapstick way deals with gender issues, adoption, bigamy, marriage as an institution, science vs. the occult, and, well, the correct most up to date way to bring up baby (circa 1944).      

See this professor, well, writer anyway, Casanova Brown (played by lanky, laconic Gary Cooper usually seen in serious stuff like facing down gunslingers and the mob in High Noon, setting things right in Washington, D.C., or taking up the fight in the International Brigades in Spain, and a little romance on the side, in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s Farewell To Arms), all Midwest naiveté in tack goes off the rails when he, as will happen to anybody, goes to New York City and gets married to some Mayfair swell co-ed, Isabel (played by classic 1940s girl next door Teresa Wright),  in a whirlwind romance. The marriage does not take hold once Casanova pulls the hammer down on Isabel’s mother’s reliance on astrology and other occult methods for running their lives. They split up, that marriage is annulled, and Casanova heads back to the Midwest to try to marry a willowy blonde who also comes from wealth (and a dingbat ne’er-do-well gold-digger father)  

Then things start getting interesting since on the very eve of his marriage to willowy blonde, Madge by name, he gets information that a baby is to be born in Chicago and he needs to get there. As it turned out Isabel and Casanova might have split up by they were doing some fooling around before then since Isabel got pregnant and by the time Casanova gets to Chicago he is the father to a bouncing baby girl. A girl whom Isabel, now not married but a mother, not a good thing in staid 1940s land, has put up for adoption. Once Casanova gets a look at the baby though all his paternal, hell, maybe maternal instincts come out and he is daffy for the little one.

 

Not just daffy though but also determined to not have his baby adopted by some strangers. So like any good father he kidnaps the baby and hides out in a hotel where everybody except the police is looking for him. In the process he is also, as a good professor, man of science, and rational thinker a good mother to the child looking up all the then current literature on bringing up baby. But the heat was on so he decided to marry a hotel housekeeper (the called maids) to be able to keep the child. Naturally, in the end after all this is a romantic comedy, Casanova and Isabel get back together and all is right with the world and baby will grow up to be part of the generation of ‘68 who tried to turn the world upside down, and lost.

Now let’s see if you were paying attention. The baby was not illegitimate, Casanova did not commit bigamy, twice (to Madge or the hotel maid), and the stars were all aligned for them, occult mother or not. Now about that kidnapping charge. You know this is a 1940s film so you know very well no charges were brought. If you like screwball comedies this one will make you laugh, and scratch your head.            

The Great Blue-Pink American West Ghost Dance Night-With The Late Peter Paul Markin In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell had for the past twenty or so years regularly tuned to the local National Public Radio station on his car radio when one day recently when after he started his car up he heard a sound, a familiar sound from the past, the sound of the primordial chant of some Plains Indians, warriors, echoing off the walls of some canyon as they took part in a ghost dance  (Indians now called variously Native Americans or Native Peoples but when he told his story to several old high school acquaintances he preferred to call them Indians a term of usage the first time he encountered the experience back in the late 1960s before AIM and others changed the nomenclature). He had had to stop what he was doing, stop getting ready to head back to his law office, and just sit and listen in order to find out why that ancient sound was coming from his car speakers that day. As it turned out the program, a talk program whose segments were each day dedicated to some topical subject, had been on the subject of a recent extraordinary exhibition of Plains Indian art and crafts being held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the ghost dance chants had been used as background to end one section of the program. As Sam put the car in gear once he knew what had transpired with the radio on in the background he began to think back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and the late Peter Paul Markin (always called just Markin by everybody except his mother and a first wife who tried to impress her Mayfair swell parents with the old WASP-ish three name moniker to no avail) travelling the hitchhike road like many in their generation found themselves out into the New Mexico high desert, high as kites on drugs, performing their own version of the ghost dance, the dance that Sam believed united them, he, Markin and two other travelling male companions with the memories of ten thousand years of warriors who had roamed that ancient space.     

That high heavens chanting haunted Sam Lowell, usually these days an unassumingly lawyer getting ready to down-size his life, down-size along his life with that of his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, but those sounds brought back all kinds of memories of those youthful days when he and Markin had believed that they could turn the world upside down, and live to tell about it. Markin, unfortunately, had paid the price by his over-indulgence into everything from money to women to drugs he could get his hands on and like many over-reachers he got burned, burned badly later in the 1970s when a drug deal down in Sonora went bad and he wound up face down in some dusty back alley for reasons that were still murky some forty years later.

That unclaimed fate in some dusty unmarked wooden plank grave in potter’s field with the wolves baying in the background, haunted Sam for years, especially since he had been warned by others who were in the know not to attempt to go to Mexico and find out what the hell happened under penalty of finding himself too down in some dusty back alley with half his head blown off and left to simmer in an unmarked grave in potter’s field. Sam, unlike Markin, had seen the writing on the wall as he sensed well before Markin that the ebb tide of the search for a “newer world” had been marked by  early 1970, the bourgeois reaction (Markin’s term but rightly used  under those circumstances) was getting ready to pull the hammer down, pull it down hard and he had walked back to the “new normal” (law school, budding law practice, first marriage, kids, white picket fence, and settling down to that bourgeois lifestyle Markin was always railing against right up until the last time Sam had seem him in late 1975 before that fateful trip to Sonora.

Funny Sam thought as he thought back to the early days, the days when he and Markin and a six or seven other guy would hang around holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in their hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, Markin had been the “prophet,” the guy who sensed the flood tide of the 1960s well before any of them. They were mostly poor ass corner boys into small larcenies and scams to grab dough for “hot” dates with girls from other towns, cars and swilling up cheapjack liquor. Markin had practically invented the words angst and alienation to define what they were about and would spout forth on any dough-less, girl-less Friday night that the new breeze that he could palpably feel when he would sneak up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see what was what and they would kid him, kid him mercilessly about being a “beatnik” or a fag (yeah, it was that kind of time among the hard-core working-class guys in a million towns like Carver when nobody thought anything of fag-baiting just as a test of manhood, thankfully done with, mostly).       

All this memory business was too much for Sam to handle on his own, had him preoccupied for days and Laura who had not known Markin having entered Sam’s life after his two hard-bitten failed marriages (hers too, two failed marriages) except by Sam harping on his legend whenever he got a drunk or melancholy. Laura made it clear on several occasions that she did not want Sam to talk about those times, the times of Sam’s two unsuccessful marriages which intersected with Markin’s time, and so she was no help in this matter. So Sam did what he had begun to do more frequently since he had been leaving more of the legal business in his office he had built up in Carver to his two younger partners and since he had a couple of years before had been involved with his 50^th anniversary class reunion committee and got in contact with his fellow still living corner boys. Guys like Frankie Riley, a fellow lawyer who had migrated to Boston and a large law firm, the guy who had been the unquestioned leader of the corner boys and one of the great midnight creep sneak thieves who ever lived in Carver, Jack Dawson, the now widowed print shop owner in town who had made a ton of money back in the day by expanding his business to include silk-screening posters and tee-shirts when that was all the rage, Jack “Mr. Toyota” Callahan, the great Carver High running back who subsequently became the owner of the biggest Toyota dealership in the area, Jimmy Jenkins, a pretty good car mechanic, and before he very recently had passed away, Allan Johnson, the great naval draftsman who designed several big ships.            

Since that reunion committee time, a committee which Sam had been active in around the edges and which had permitted him to connect with the old corner boys who had not been together since they had scattered to the winds a couple of years after high school, the guys would periodically get together at Frankie Riley’s favorite Boston bar, the Sunnyville Grille, over near Copley Square. (Although all the other guys had attended the reunion Sam had not attended the event since he had had a “run-in” with old high school flame Melinda Loring, run-in meaning serious steps leading to an affair which she called off before it got to that stage since he was balking over leaving Laura, which precluded his attendance under penalty of endless embarrassment and baiting by the guys). This “ghost dance” memory, no question, required a meeting in order for Sam to talk about that long ago event that some of the guys knew about vaguely when they too had headed west with Markin on different hitchhike road trips. So one Friday night, a spring Friday night, Sam gathered everybody n around a small side room table that they frequently used once Frankie became friendly with Johnny O’Connor the owner of the grille and told his story.  Frankie, who had an old habit of writing notes going back to law school days so he would not forget something, took notes of this session and gave the notes to me after he told me the story and I have tried to recreate what Sam told the group here, with just a little flourish:

The last time Sam went out on the road with Markin, or maybe the time before that, they had had some pretty tough luck after they got a ride to Chicago from a forlorn trucker who picked them up at the old Coca-Cola bottling plant right next to the Boston side of the Charles River but more importantly right at the entrance to the Mass Turnpike which led all road west. Sam thought he was pretty sure the guys knew where that now long gone spot had been (Frankie had nodded his head in the affirmative) once a professional drifter he had run into out in Springfield as he was heading to Albany to see some woman told Markin that was the place to start hitching west out of Boston proper. Most of the guys who had headed out from Carver with Markin had left from there and picked up the Pike closer to Sturbridge. (Heads nodded in the affirmative.) But in those days there was a truck depot in back of that Coca-Cola plant spot and you could go and ask guys, truck drivers mostly but once in a while a guy in a big old sedan (maybe with a girl, maybe not, but never a woman, or women, without guys, not until you got to California anyway) on where they were heading. Your best bet was older guys, older truck drivers, who were tough enough for the life and  who didn’t mind “hippies, ” guys like Sam and Markin then with long hair, wispy beards, the whole regalia (laughter), since maybe his son or daughter had caught the “bug” and he wanted to get your take on what was with young people in those days so when he got home, if he ever did so he could “relate” to the kids he hardly ever saw since those kids, that wife, and those house mortgage and credit card payments had him glued to the road. Some guys just liked to have somebody in the cabin to “yeah” them while they were chewing bennies like jelly beans with black coffee chasers and yakking away about the federal regulators, what they were carrying running overweight on the scales, their no good ex-wives bleeding them for alimony, their no-good girlfriends running around with every Johnny in town while they were humping out in white line night, taxes, and the country going to hell in handbasket right before their eyes into a sullen breeze at seventy-five miles an hour.

So the guys had had the usual good luck out of Boston, getting a ride from that forlorn Yale Freight truck driver named Denver Slim carrying a big load of motors to the Windy City who was neither from Denver (Baltimore, with alimony wife, kids who didn’t know him, and the eternal mortgage and assorted debts which were going to he said drive him to an early grave) nor slim (maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of  softness although neither of them would have wanted to tackle him if got his dander up) but after Chicago it was tough going, about three rides or four to Denver, maybe a couple more outside to Steamboat Junction and then a guy in a big black Cadillac stopped them on the road out of the Junction and asked them if going to New Mexico would help, Gallup, he said. Markin in those days didn’t care how or where he landed in California as long as he got to his precious Pacific Ocean so he could talk about that old flame of his, Angelica, whom he had met after he got out of the Army while he was on the road one time down in Steubenville, Ohio, who went on the road with him for a couple of months before deciding she was not built for the nomadic road life, and whom Sam thought he never got over despite two subsequent short marriages.

Angelica had come out to see him in California when he was living in a tent up at Point Magoo a few month later to see if they could go on together and she had flipped out the first time that she, a Midwestern girl from some Podunk town in Indiana, had ever seen the ocean and almost drown in a riptide around Malibu. Markin had had to pull her out just as she was going under. Things didn’t work out but he had a great story to tell about some big thing sex thing that had when she got stoned for the first time out there and they had some Zen experience as the sun went down on the ocean out to the Japan seas. Sam could always tell when they were within about fifty miles of the Pacific, maybe more, maybe out in Reno someplace, because Markin would start on his Angelica story. Jesus, what a mad man then (and Jesus they all agreed they still missed the bastard now too).

He thought that saving Angelica was the greatest thing because as the guys knew, especially Allan, who had known Markin the longest having known him back in the third grade down in the Carver housing projects where they had both grown up. Allan had been on the beach the day Markin almost drowned himself when he was eight or nine over in Plymouth when he did some bone-head thing, grabbed a log and sailed out sea and then let go when he was too far out and some lifeguard had to go save him. Markin had that mysterious furious love-hate thing about the ocean his whole misbegotten life, and hated the idea of being too far away from the ocean always making everybody laugh about not letting him be buried in Kansas or someplace like that. (The guys had all gotten melancholy more than a few times since they reconnection that there he was buried down in some sullen grave in some old dusty Mex town far from ocean breezes.)

Sam apologized for getting off track about Angelica and the old days in the great blue-pink great American West night that Markin always called what he was searching for but Markin really didn’t care which end of the state he landed in so they had taken that big old Cadillac ride, the first time either of them had been in a Caddy, down to Gallup. It seemed to take forever though since the guy, Billy Bob somebody Sam could not remember his last name from Odessa out in the Texas night, was an insurance salesman and he stopped in about twenty towns along the way to check out the local agents and their activities. That trip, or rather that part of the trip kind of made Sam realize that deep down he was not cut out for the eternal hitchhike road, was basically a small town boy rooted to home and no longer ready to take on the monsters who were holding the young,” youth nation” Markin used to call it trying to put some glue to the ten million things everybody young was doing, sometimes at cross purposes, back from that “newer world” Markin loved to talk about. Yeah, Sam had had enough of the road by then so there was a certain tension between them as they drifted toward Gallup.

Yeah, Sam had enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. (Laughter.) Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners used to heat quicksilver coffee when they were camped out in some desolate campsite  (that instrument last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out flame out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country willowing winds hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever more mildewed with each wet ground experience), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (which they had gotten not from Markin’s Vietnam army gear but as World War II surplus from Eddy’s Army and Navy store over in Plymouth and which Markin would slyly hint that his had last been in desperate need of washing after a couple of month of night exertions with Angelica, those ever laughing hands of his reaching out to her in those two to a bag days), and minute, small, no speed in throwing up, especially when rains came pouring down and they were caught out  without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe, pegged Army surplus pup tents too, also from Eddy’s. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Atlantic or Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it. Yeah, Sam had tired of the road after a couple of years running back and forth across the country, each trip seemingly with less purpose, less Sam purpose.

Sam told the others after that blast that he was sorry for ranting about all the stuff that they probably all remembered, or half-remembered about and how they all, after Markin insisted on making it his fashion statement, had the obligatory green Army surplus rucksack on one shoulder which Markin said contained all a man, “a new man,” or really an old Johnny Appleseed American primitive man needed to survive in the world of the road and  the bedroll, complete with ground cloth against the wetness and dampness if you found yourself alongside some cow pasture or some such unlikely place on the other shoulder. Lately though, as he had unburdened himself of the day to day running of his law office, Sam had been almost possessed by a certain line of thinking he was going through to take a whack at summing up a lifetime of activity. He thought in all fairness there were a million good lawyers out there, a goodly number better than he would ever be, and the world when he came through law school in the early 1970s would not have crumbled if he had not been the one million and first, had thought too that anybody of the billions of people in the world could have put two unsuccessful marriages together (although surviving that dual madness ultimately lead to Laura when she came his way in the later 1980s, a definite plus) but maybe if he had stuck it out with Markin and his dreams, hadn’t gotten tied up with those bourgeois dreams Markin kept putting holes in that had dragged at Sam’s heart back then, maybe kept that mad man in check a little, maybe had help try to turn the world upside down like Markin wanted when he got political, hell, got to be a street fighter after that Vietnam stint, he would be here with his old corner boys now, and he could tell this story that Sam was now bound to tell. Sam though also had thoughts mixed in that he did not know with Markin’s big, what did he call them (Frankie had shouted out “wanting habits,” adding Markin got it from a line in a Bessie Smith song), that’s right “wanting habits” snapped back maybe he was that doomed “half-Mick, half swamp hillbilly” that he was always talking about but that had been what Sam had been thinking about of late. [This is not the place to go about Markin’s genealogy but he had been raised by a half-crazed Irish mother who had been totally bewildered by motherhood and by the down cast of her life when she met up with certain good-looking po’ boy Marine from out into hill-billy hills of Appalachia and that division of the gene pool probably did give him reason to think he, like lot of political black guys at the time, that he was doomed.]  

After that insurance salesman left Sam and Markin off at Gallup, actually at a hobo “jungle” camp beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just outside of town they had stayed at that camp for a few days before heading west on Interstate 40 heading toward Los Angeles. They had had to leave that camp one night in a hurry once some ornery wino stew-bum, Blind Blinky, got an idea in his head that two good-looking (to him anyway) young boys (again to him) might make good bed companions and from what they had heard from other stew-bums if he wanted something like that he would get his way and nobody could stop him. Markin by the way always called them hobos telling Sam that some guy with the moniker Black River Blackie who was some kind of royalty in the stew-bum world of the Gallup camp told him there were three grades of stew-bums-tramps, bums, and hobos and that tramps and bums were not allowed in that camp since hobos were the kings of the drifter night. Someone else could figure out the “jungle” sociology they just wanted to get the hell out of there before they were both somebody’s sissies.   

After a couple of rides Sam and Markin had put many a mile between them and Gallup closing in on Phoenix before they stopped for a breather first getting a ride from a good old boy trucker from Alabama named Buck White who while chiding them on their Yankee-ness had been kindness itself with cigarettes, bennies, buying meals, good cheap meals too at the out of the way diners he frequented after a life-time of learning every good and bad truck stop from Boston to San Diego, but by then they really were well clear of that prairie fire nightmare and after that on to sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ otherwise Sam said he would have melted into the ground right there, Markin too who would sweat like a fiend the minute the weather got the least bit hot) not far from some old run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing their attention. Those sights, once Sam saw them, made him think of home for some reason, made him want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath since in preparation for a previous trip she had tried to stop him saying did he want to be boy scout living in the wilderness forever. (Joyell, Sam’s first disastrous wife had threated to leave him and marry another guy, a guy from Plymouth who had a car, a steady job, and worked at the shipyard making “good money” as she would badger him with if he did not stop hitting the road every time Markin clanged his bell which helped to get him to kick the road habit. In the end she had waited for Sam but that whole set-up had been wrong about seven different ways as Markin would periodically warn him but on the trip he was fretting about her and that latest leaving threat). Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when guys like Buck and his tribe come through because no way did you want to tangle with him, or guys like him, young or old.)

Part of the reason for heading to Joshua Tree once they had taken the ride and the road south toward Gallup and Interstate 40 had been to connect up with a couple of guys that Markin had run into the year before, Jack and Mattie, whom Markin had told Sam about, both fellow ‘Nam vets although they were all “in country” at different times, good guys, on the hitchhike road out of Massachusetts heading to Washington, D.C. for a big anti-war Vietnam veterans action and whom he had continued to stay in contact afterward as they ambled their way across the country. Originally Markin had arranged to meet Jack and Mattie in Denver but they had already headed west to avoid the snow-blazed trails which could have occurred any time before real winter had set in. They had thereafter agreed to meet Markin in Joshua Tree if they all got there by the end of October otherwise in Los Angeles where they all were going to stay with an up and coming “new age” film director, the guy who made one of the definitive “hippie” films of the time Something Happened you can get on NetFlix now, who had a communal house set up in Topanga Canyon. (After Joshua Tree and a few misadventures around Indio they all did get to Topanga Canyon and stayed at that commune for the winter.) Markin and Sam arrived while Jack and Mattie, and a Volkswagen bus filled with the usual assortment of freaks and good-looking “chicks” (a term of art at the time, sorry), were still in a primitive campsite in Joshua Tree. For a few days the dope flowed freely, the wine maybe a little less so as in the battle between getting “high” on drugs and booze drugs usually won out, and the big kettle on the fireplace brew stew made up of who knows what that every member in good standing of “youth nation” survived on during that whole time even less, mostly eating just enough to keep the vultures away.

One of those nights, maybe the third, third night of grass, mescaline, hash, some low-grade opium, and for the first time, first time for Sam, peyote buttons Jack had gotten from some Navajos on the way out to Joshua Tree. Jack had traded a stash of grass for the buttons, bartering being one form of payment transfer during those days when the talk was rife about how once “youth nation” was in charge they were going to abolish money. Markin would rant for hours about the need to abolish money and just trade stuff you needed for stuff the other guy needed although that did not stop him from conning money out of everybody he met, especially women who gave it to him without a quarrel, that “wanting habit” thing never far from his benighted fellahin head. That night they were all sitting by this big Joshua night camp fire that somebody, “Jumping” Jones the owner of the Volkswagen bus Sam thought, kept blazing, casting weird ghost night-like shadows that just made Sam’s Joyell hunger worst. Got him thinking about how she never really did fit into the Markin-Lowell-Riley-Johnson et al campfire road trip scene even close to home. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a long handle-bar mustache and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck White found ugly in his America although Mattie had done two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to Sam) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

And so there they were making that last push to the coast but not before they absorbed these Native American lands that, as it turns out, Markin, Jack, Mattie and Sam all had been interested in ever since their kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-A-long Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier on this day Sam had been talking about they had been  over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the West  not all that long ago but who were now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. (This before the great AIM movement break-out and Wounded Knee/Pine Ridge/Leonard Peltier kick ass times later in the 1970s.) The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of their own warrior shaman trances were still in their heads in front of this now blazing camp fire night. Sam was still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive out marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but they had all started in on those peyote buttons Jack had scored (scored from those wily Navajos who used it strictly for religious purposes, and as you so did they, kind of) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (everybody laughed that old time knowing laugh when Sam said that had been strictly for medicinal purposes as well).

Just then in this dark, abyss dark, darker than Sam had ever seen  the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell he was embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And his ears didn’t deceive him,  and they didn’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle Sam heard, and heard plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

After more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, Sam swore, swore on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls he saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that he had heard after so many defeats against the blue soldiers’ guns in the late 19^th century, got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, the four of them, three of them having seen hard combat in ‘Nam first-hand (Sam had been deferred from the military draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father died in 1965), those four, those four television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so they were actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until they sped up to catch the real pace. After what seemed an eternity they were, Sam too, were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.

 

But then just as quickly the flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and they crumbled in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. They, after regaining some strength, all decided that they had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, would do them in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment they, or at least Sam knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.

     

Making The Comeback On The Weary Comeback Trail-Michael Keaton’s The Birdman  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, 2014

 

Some people get plenty of fame (or infamy), enough to last a lifetime, and some as the Pop artists extraordinaire Andy Warhol noted get fifteen minutes of fame. But what about a guy, a guy who got plenty of fame back in the day as an cinematic comic book-type action hero, well, as Birdman, complete with sequels, and who kind of fell beneath the radar once he stopped doing that role, and had been searching for something would give him his big comeback, and enhance his status as a creative artist and not just a comic book cut-out. Well then you have the premise, or one of the premises, behind the Michael Keaton comeback film, The Birdman.

Here is the beauty of this storyline. Everybody with any artistic temperament has written off Hollywood as mere tinsel town all glitter, gimmicks and no substance, written off the whole thing as a safe place for airheads. So Riggan Thomson (played by Michael Keaton), washed up in the film business, decides after a long hiatus to go to New York City, to Broadway and the “real” theater to make his comeback in a play he had written, would direct and act in. A play based on a small idea put out a couple sentences by the very real great short story writer, Raymond Carver. Of course a washed up actor trying to make a comeback is going to have about eight million problems making the transition, especially since virtually nobody thinks the thing will float. And in the end it doesn’t, or doesn’t solve Riggan’s nagging problem of taking himself seriously, or having people like the bitchy Times “make or break” theater critic take him seriously, of having his ex-wife taking him seriously, of having his “recovering” daughter theater assistant taking him seriously, of having his current not pregnant actress girlfriend taking him seriously, of Mike Shiner (played by Edward Norton), a serious Broadway actor taking him seriously, hell, of his alter ego ghost of Birdman taking him seriously. So throw in a little “magical realism” (Riggan taking flight in New York City and not being shot down by half the scrambled U.S. Air Force) and “super-realism” (his actually shooting himself at the end of the play in the nose in a fit of hubris) and a welcome comeback performance by the much missed Keaton and you have a very nice dark, dark comedy. Even Raymond Carver would chuckle at this one.             

Satin-Voiced  Ben E. King  Of Stand By Me Last Chance Last Dance Fame Passes On At 76-The Dance Hall 1960s Night Sits A Little Dimmer  

 

 

 

 

This piece was not written fro Ben E. King but it could have been...

Funny how memory draws you in, draws you in tight and hard once you focus in just a little. Take this combination. Recently I have been involved in writing some little sketches for my North Adamsville High School reunion Class of 1964 website. You know never before revealed stuff (and maybe should not be revealed now except I believe the statute of limitations has run out on most offenses) about what went on in the class rooms when some ill-advised teacher turned his or her on the class; the inevitable tales of triumph and heartbreak as told in the boys’ or girls’ Monday morning before school talkfest about what did, or did not, go on over the weekend with Susie or Billy; the heart-rending saga of being dateless for the senior prom; the heroics and devastating defeats of various sports teams especially the goliaths of the gridiron every leaf-turning autumn; the mysteries of learning about sex (I thought this might get your attention, innocent exploration or not) in the chaste day time down at the summer-side beach, or late at night after not watching the double feature at the outdoor drive-in movies (look it up on the Internet that there was such a way to watch them); date night devouring some hardened hamburgers complete with fries and Coke at the local all-know drive-in restaurant (ditto look up that too); older and car-addled taking the victory spoils after some after midnight “chicken run”; spending “quality time” watching breathlessly the “submarine races” (ask somebody from North Adamsville about that); and, just hanging out with your corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore throwing dimes and quarters in the jukebox to while the night away. Yeah, strictly 1960s memory stuff.   

Put those memory flashes together with my, seemingly, endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing a commercial classic rock and roll series that goes under the general title Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die. I noted in one review and it bears repeating here while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music. Those two memory-inducing events coming together got me thinking even further back than high school, back to elementary school down at Adamsville South where music and sex (innocent, chaste variety) came together at the record hop (alternatively called the sock hop if in your locale the young girls wore bobby sox rather than nylons to these things. Nylons being one of the sure signs that you were a young women and not merely some stick girl so the distinction was not unimportant).    

See we, we small-time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word meaning not knowledgeable, not the malicious sense, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off to the radio or when we scurried home right after school to watch American Bandstand when that program came on in late afternoon. And we hungry to be “hip” (although not knowing that word, not knowing that out in the adult world guys, guys mostly, guys in places like North Beach in Frisco town or the Village in New Jack City were creating the ethos of hipness which we would half-inherit later as latent late term “beats”) wanted to emulate those swaying, be-bopping television boys and girls if not on the beauties of that medium then with some Friday or Saturday night hop in the school gym or in some church basement complete with some cranky record player playing our songs, our generation-dividing songs (dividing us for the prison of our parents music heard endlessly, too endlessly if there is such a concept).

Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billy who I will talk about some other time, who claimed, with a straight face, to the girls that he was Elvis’ long lost son. My friend’s twelve to Elvis’s maybe twenty. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears, at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Yah right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway). And the local hop put paid to that notion, taking the private music of our bedroom dreams and placing us, for good or evil, out on the dance floor to be wall-flower or “hip” (remember we did not know that term then, okay.)   

But can you blame me, or us, for our jail-break visions and our clandestine subterranean life-transistor radio dreams of lots of girls (or boys as the case may be), lots of cars, and lots of money if we could just get out from under that parental noise. Now getting back to that rock and roll series I told you that I had been reviewing. The series had many yearly compilations but as if to prove my point beyond discussion the year 1956 has two, do you hear me, two CDs to deal with that proposition that I mentioned above. And neither one includes Elvis, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley or some other stuff that I might have included so you know we are in the golden age when there is that much good non- Hall of Fame stuff around.

Needless to say Larry Larkin, my old corner boy from North Adamsville home town day Phil Larkin’s cousin, remained a step ahead of everybody around Ashmont Street in the Dorchester section of Boston during those days, those days when that seismic change occurred in our youthful listening habits. (And Larry would transfer whatever cultural knowledge he had picked up on those Dorchester mean streets, mostly useful except more often than not wrong on the do’s and don’ts of sex, to Phil, known as “Foul-Mouth” Phil among the corner boy brethren who would pass it on to us). Everybody, everything had to change, had to take notice of the break-out, if only to cut off the jailbreak at the pass. And that is where Larry Larkin’s step ahead of everybody else came into play, everybody else who counted then, and that was mainly the junior corner boys who hung around in front of Kelly’s Variety Store on Adams Street where generations, at least two by that time and more since, of elementary school boys learned the corner life, for good or evil, mostly evil as a roster of those who wound up in the various county and state prisons would testify to.

And not just any elementary school corner boys but parochial school boys. That is what was significant about my bringing attention to the environs of the Dorchester section of Boston, a section loaded down with every kind of ethnic Catholic, recent immigrant or life-time denizen of the triple decker night, and where it seemed there was a Catholic church on every corner (and there almost was, and to prove the point Dorchester boys, girls too lately, identified themselves after being from “Dot” identified themselves by what parish they belonged to, say Saint Brendan’s on Main Street, Saint Gregory on Dorchester Avenue, Saint Anne’s on Neponset Avenue and so on, a phenomenon you would not notice in say Revere or Chelsea).

If there seemed to be a church on every corner there was sure to be a bevy, if that is the way they are gathered, of parish priests ready to guide the youth in the ways of the church, including at Saint Brendan’s one Lawrence Joseph Larkin. And one of the things that had upset that 1950s era bevy of priests at that parish (and at other parishes and had caused concern in other religious groupings as well) was the effect that the new music, rock and roll, in corrupting the morals of the youth. Was making them zombies listening on those transistor radios that seemed to be attached to their ears to the exclusion of all else. Was making them do lewd, yes, lewd, moves while they were dancing (and not even dancing arm and arm with some girl but kind of free-form about three feet away from each other as if the space between was some sacred land to be worshiped but not defiled, blasphemy, pure blasphemy) at what they called record hops, or sock hops, or some such thing on Friday nights at the public school Eliot School over on Ashmont Street. Was making them a little snarly when dealing with adults a snarl they learned from the television or movies with guys named Elvis or James leading them on, begging them to follow them in the great break-out.  Worse, worse of all was the danger of dangers, sex, which bad as the fast dancing was when they did an occasion slow dance was very improper, the guys hands drifting down to the girl’s ass and she not even swatting it away. So yes there was something like a panic about to erupt.

And formerly pious altar boy Larry Larkin was leading the charge, was the first to wear those damn longer sideburns like he was some Civil War general. To constantly rake his hair with that always back pocket comb to look like Elvis’ pompadour style (strangely Larry was a dead-eye blue-eyed blonde kid, so go figure). He had introduced the new flaky dance moves like the Watushi learned from eternal afternoon rush home from school American Bandstand, from his older brothers   or from “Foul-Mouth” Phil’s latest intelligence from his older brothers , that had priests and parents alike on fire, had been the villain who had introduced the move of the boy putting his hand almost to a girl’s ass when slow dancing (the girls learned to not swat them away on their own so don’t blame Larry for that one), and a mass of other sins, mortal and venial. All learned, according to the priests, at that damn (although they did not use that word publicly) secular school over on Ashmont Street. The priests and a few like-minded parents were determined after a collective meeting of the minds among themselves to put a stop to this once and for all.      

Their strategy was simplicity itself, with few moving parts to complicate things-“if you can’t fight them, join them.” So come the first Friday night in November of the year of our Lord 1957 Saint Brendan’s Parish used its adjacent auditorium for its first sock hop. Worse, worse for Larry, hell, worse for everybody who learned anything at all from him, and liked it, boy or girl, the priests had ordered from their Sunday pulpits  that every parent with teenagers was to send their charges to the hop under penalty, of I don’t know what, but under penalty. And thus the long chagrin death march faces come that first hop night.                       

Obviously there were to be certain, ah, restrictions, enforced by the chaperones inevitable at such gatherings of the young, those chaperones being the younger priests of the parish who were allegedly closer to the kids, had a clue to what was going on, or else dour older boys and girls, probably headed to the seminaries and convents themselves, or those who were sucking up to the priests for sin brownie point. Banned: no lipstick or short dresses (short being anything above the ankle practically in those days) on girls and ties and jackets for boys and no slick stuff on their hair. Worse, worst of all no grabbing ass on the slow dances (not put that way but the reader will get the picture). Yes, boring made more so by the selection of records that were something out of their parents’ vault with nothing faster than some Patti Page number yakking about old Cape Cod or Marty Robbins crooning about white carnations cranking out on the old record player that had been donated by Smiling Jack’s Record Store over on the Boulevard. (Jack O’Malley, proprietor of the shop, a notorious drunk and skirt-chaser in his off hours obviously in desperate need of indulgences, no question).           

Enter Larry Larkin who had been dragged to the front door of the auditorium by his parents and who were duly recognized by Father Joyce, the young priest put in charge of the operation by Monsignor Lally (although Larry had not been too hard dragged since Maggie Kelly was to be there, yes, he had it bad for her). Now everybody knew that Phil had a “boss” record collection either bought from his earnings as a caddie over at the golf course on weekends and in the summer or “clipped” from Smiling Jack’s (and if the reader needs to know what “clipped” meant well we will just leave it at Larry did not pay for them). They also knew he has a pretty good record player with an amplifier that his parents had bought for him the Christmas before last. None of that stuff some of which had used by Loopy Lenny the DJ over at the Eliot School sock hops would be used this evening and some of the kids commented on the fact that Larry came record empty-handed. Yes all the signs where there for a boring evening.   

But here is where fate took a turn on a dime, or maybe not fate so much as the fact that the new breeze coming through the teenage land was gathering some fierce strength in aid of the jail-break many like Larry knew was coming, had to come. About half way through the first part of the dance when more kids were milling around than dancing, talking in boy-girl segregated corners, when even the wallflowers were getting restless and threatening to dance, and they never danced but just hung to their collective walls, definitely before the intermission, all of a sudden from “heaven” it seemed came blaring out Danny and the Juniors At The Hop and the formerly downbeat scene started jumping with kids dancing up a storm (including a few former wallflowers who too must have sensed a portent in the air). The priests bewildered by where the music was coming from tried to investigate while Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock came on with the kids dancing fast like crazy (including some off-hand grabbing ass usually reserved for slow dances). Irate and failing to find the source of the “devil’s music” Father Joyce, red-faced (whether because he knew that the closed dance doomed him among the kids or because he was going to on the carpet with the Monsignor and probably consigned to do the 6:00 AM weekday masses) declared the dance over. Done. And that was the last time Saint Brendan’s Parish sponsored a sock hop for their tender youth charges.         

Oh, yes, how does Larry Larkin last seen among the milling around crowd on the dance floor fit into this whole mix. Simple, he had hired Jimmy Jenkin, a non-Catholic ace tech guy older friend of his brother, Jack, and therefore not subject to the fire and brimstone of hell for his heathen actions, to jerry-rig Larry’s sound system in a room with an electric outlet near up near the rafters of the auditorium, a place that the good priests were probably totally unaware of. Money well spent and a kudo to Jimmy. And Larry, well, if you want to see Larry (and “Foul-Mouth” Phil, now a regular weekly visitor at his cousin’s, ready to bring the new dispensation across the river to Adamsville) then show up some Friday night at the Eliot School where he will be dancing to the latest tunes with Maggie Kelly in tow. Enough said.          

Hey, here are some stick-outs records from Larry’s collection used by Loopy Lenny at the Eliot School that every decent hopping, be-bopping record hop (or sock hop, okay) spun out of pure gold:

Blue Suede Shoes, Carl Perkins (Elvis covered it and made millions but old Carl had a better old rockabilly back beat on his version); In The Still Of The Night, The Five Satins (a doo wop classic that I am humming right this minute, sha dot do be doo, sha dot do be doo or something like that spelling, okay); Eddie, My Love, The Teen Queens (incredible harmony, doo wop back-up, and, and “oh Eddie, please don’t make me wait too long” as part of the lyrics, Whoa!); Roll Over Beethoven, Chuck Berry ( a deservedly early break-out rock anthem. Hell I thought it was a big deal just to trash my parents’ Patti Page old Chuck went after the big boys like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.); Be-Bop-a-Lula, Gene Vincent (the guy was kind of a one hit wonder but Christ what a one hit, "yah, she’s my baby now"); Blueberry Hill, Fats Domino (that old smooth piano riffing away); Rip It Up, Little Richard (he/she wild man Richard rips it up); Young Love, Sonny James ( dreamy stuff that those giggling girls at school loved, and so you "loved" too); Why Do Fools Fall In Love?, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (for a minute the king be-bop, doo wop teenage angel boy. Everybody wanted to be the doo wop king or queen, including my friend Billy); See You Later, Alligator, Bill Haley and The Comets (yah, these “old guys” could rock, especially that sax man. Think about the expression  people still use “see you later alligator”); and Since I Met You Baby, Ivory Joe Hunter (every dance pray, every last dance pray, oh my god, let them play Ivory Joe at the end so I can dance close with that certain she I have been eyeing all night).

Note: I have mentioned previously the excellent album cover art that accompanied each classic rock series compilation. Not only do they almost automatically evoke long ago memories of red hot youth, and those dreams, those steamy dance night dreams too, but has supplied this writer with more than one idea for a commentary. One of the 1956 compilation album covers is in that same vein. The cover shows what looks like a local cover band from the 1950s getting ready to perform at the local high school dance, not a record hop but if they are worth anything at all they will play the songs us po’ boys were listening to on the transistor radio or via that cranky record player lent by somebody for the occasion at the hop. Although the guys, especially the lead vocalist, look a little skittish they know they have to make a good showing because this is their small-time chance at the big time. Besides there are about six thousand other guys hanging around in their fathers’ garages ready and willing to step up if the Danny and the Bluenotes fall flat. If they don’t make that big splash hit like Danny and the Juniors did with At The Hop, the first song that got me jumping, jack they are done for.

This live band idea was actually something of a treat because, from what I personally recall, many times these school dance things survived on loud record playing dee-jay chatter, thus the term “record hop.” From the look of it the school auditorium is the locale (although ours were inevitably held in the school gym), complete with the obligatory crepe, other temporary school-spirit related ornaments and a mesmerized girl band groupie to give the joint a festive appearance.

More importantly, as I said before, at least for the band, as they are warming up for the night’s work, is that they have to make their mark here (and at other such venues) and start to get a following if they want to avoid another dreaded fate of rock life. Yes, the dreaded fate of most bands that don’t break out of the old neighborhood, the fate of having to some years down the road play at some of the students they are performing for that night children’s birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings and the like. That thought should be enough to keep these guys working until late in the night, jamming the night away, disturbing some old fogy Frank Sinatra fans in the neighborhood, perfecting those covers of Roll Over Beethoven, Rip It Up, Rock Around The Clock and Jailhouse Rock. Go to it boys, buy the ticket and ride the furies.

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. That new dispensation for my generation began back in the late 1950s, early 1960s so maybe it was when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits (Mad Men, retro-cool today, okay) and before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on the fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by a soft felt hat. It would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit combination. Maybe it was when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you.  

But maybe it was, and this is a truth which I can testify to, noting the photograph above, when some girls, probably college girls (now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, go figure) having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, flippy, whatever  don’t hold me to hairstyles to long and straight strands. (Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover the folk scene was too young and small then to cause such a sea-change).

Looking at that photograph now, culled from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High (located about thirty miles south of Boston). But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy desire, and that was that.                   

My old friend Sam Lowell, a high school friend who I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion). He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when they had their folk night (before every night was folk night at the place when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together, That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Sam thought she looked fine. Sam (like myself) was not then hip to the long straight hair thing) and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.

Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory long-stranded hair which frankly made her face even longer. When Sam asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.

Of course he compounded his troubles by making the  serious mistake of asking if she had it done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go, So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl (and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched shirt things she used to wear).     

By the way let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Sam back the early 1960s. She and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. Sam and Julie were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to Sam as they waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with me and my companion, Laura Talbot, to see if he remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while he thought he remembered he was not sure.

He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk time (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo.