*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

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The Quare Fellow-James Mason’s Odd Man Out  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Odd Man Out, starring James Mason, directed by Carol Reed (director of the noir classic The Third Man), 1947

No question being a revolutionary in non-revolutionary times is a tough dollar, or as the case here in the film under review, Odd Man Out, being such a stout-hearted fellow in Belfast (although the city is unnamed in the film but it has the look of that city and the kicker is the Royal Constabulary swarming all over the place in the 1940s), in the North, the North of Ireland after the partition which created a two-state solution in Ireland after the deal when down in the 1920s and the 1940s Irish Republican Army (IRA) partisans were left to swing in the wind. Yeah just ask stand-up IRA partisan Johnnie McQueen (although in the film the designation is simply “the organization” everybody knows what organization), a stand-up guy who did serious time in one His Majesty’s stinking prisons. Yeah, ask Johnny and the boys what’s what when times are tough and dough is tight to fight the fight for a one-state Ireland. A lot of good men, women too, including a quare fellow like Johnny have broken their teeth on that one.            

See in hard times, in times when the general population does not give a rat’s ass about unification (or whatever political program a revolutionary might be espousing) guys like Johnny and the boys have to keep body and soul together, to speak nothing of the organization, by an occasion robbery to refill the coffers. So Johnny and the boys plot and plan (after being given the assignment by that nefarious “organization”) to rob the local mill where the payroll cash will be a very good start on continuing to keep body and soul together. Naturally with stand-up Johnny as the leader. Stand-up or not though Johnny got ground down by prison, wasn’t up to leading this caper and while they grabbed the cash after that everything went to hell in a handbasket. It didn’t help that Johnny got caught up in a battle just before the getaway with some bravo who must have thought the dough being taken was personally his and in the melee got killed, got killed dead as it turned out. Johnny took a bullet too, a bullet wound which would drive the rest of the film.      

And that tells the tale of the rest of the film as Johnny is thrown pillar to post trying to dodge the coppers and get away, far away, from Belfast and the king’s sweet sweated gallows. Capturing the tensions, the mishaps, the poignancy of the streets of the town at night, a night that was filled with forebodings for Johnny, director Carol Reed as he did in The Third Man did a masterful job of cinematography capturing the back alleys and squalor of the “wrong side of the tracks” is really what drives us on to see what happens.

Well you know Johnny could come to no good end, had to take the fall one way or the other. Here is strange beauty of this plotline though. Johnny’s love interest, fellow partisan Kathleen, knowing that her man is going down, is going down hard, on her own makes a private “death pact,” wants to share Johnny’s fate. To insure that common fate as the coppers close in on Johnny Kathleen without flinching draws a pistol from her coat pocket and starts firing. Great noir touch.      

The Lost Treasure Of The Outback-With Burt Lancaster’s Rope Of Sand In Mind

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Zack James

Every once in a while Josh Breslin liked to abandon his hideaway in his old growing up hometown of Olde Saco up in coastal Maine which he had several years early returned to after living in many other places to “get the dust of that old town off his shoes” as he liked to say to his old gang and go down to Boston and join up with some old friends from Carver whom he had met back in the early 1960s through his connection with the late Pete Markin out on the hitchhike road in San Francisco. He, they, including Markin before he went over the edge in a drug deal and lost his life in the mid-1970s dealing with some serious mal hombres down south of the border who did not give a damn about some “from hunger” gringo, had spent a few years living that alternative lifestyle counter-cultural dream that was the 1960s before the night-takers pulled the hammer down and sucked all the air out of whatever small Eden they were trying to build.

They all, except Markin, one way or another read the tea leaves of the ebb tide of the 1960s and made their respective “armed truces” as Sam Lowell, one of their number from Carver, liked to call it and went back to whatever they had intended to do before the action in the 1960s caught them in its web, including Josh who spent his time as a free-lance writer for half the small and medium-sized publications in the country. Josh, Frankie Riley the schoolboy leader of the tribe in Carver although more laid back out West where being herd-riding “boss” was in bad odor, Sam, Sam Eaton, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber and the recently deceased Benny Borden known always as the Be-Bop Kid after he latched onto  Benny Goodman and went crazy for swing when the rest of us were seriously into acid-etched rock (we called that friendly enough “different strokes for different folks,” and it was just fine) kept in touch over the years and would meet periodically over drinks and dinner, although frequently as they have been retired or semi-retired mainly drinks, at the Rusty Nail in downtown Boston to reminisce over old times and tell some new lies. One such occasion a while back was the reason that Josh had come down from Maine.

Now almost like in their schoolboy days the subject matter under discussion at any of these get-togethers could range from the general rage they felt for the war policies of the current American government since they had all more or less retained their hatred for war carried over from Vietnam War days of which Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley and the Be-Bop Kid had been veterans of and the others staunch opponents of including jail-time to what was new in music or seen on YouTube, film or books. (Sam Eaton said filled in the blank for which current government it is in the now endless wars that preoccupy Washington.) Josh usually of late had been regaling the group with his reviews of various old-time black and white movies he had watched via Netflix DVDs or streamed on his T.V. now that he had time to do so. He was especially crazy over film noir or anything that smacked of that genre and the other guys usually gave him a listen since they had all seen at least some the films from the old days down in Carver at the Strand Theater where they would take in the Saturday afternoon kids’ matinee double-feature or later went at night on hot dates up into the balconies with “hot” dates at that same locale.     

On the night in question after warming up to the subject with a high shelf shot of Chivas neat (many steps up from old time Johnny Walker Black with water chaser, praise be, Josh praise be)  Josh started talking about gold, about how the gold lust in the classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre did Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston in. Got them nothing but windy graves down in old Mexico when the mal hombres came to take the gold away from them. (Everyone, including Josh, could only think after he had made that statement about what happened in the film about Markin and his unmarked potter’s field grave down there in Sonora, south of the border, and you could almost hear a collective moan, moan for man, moan for that old sainted bastard still missed and moaned over all these years later.)       

The reason Josh brought up the gold lust was that that precious mineral was not the only substance that men would fight and die over, would get that strange blood lust in their eyes to grab a fistful of. Having seen almost all the A film noirs available these days Josh had been checking out the vast array of B noirs and the one he wanted to talk about that night starred Burt Lancaster in an odd-ball noir entitled Rope of Sand. Here the lust, blooded or not, name your lust but here diamonds, diamonds found by the bags full, diamonds for the taking down in Southern Africa if you were man enough to go and grab them, and had the strength to keep them. A lesson lost on the boys in the Sierra Madre. Here’s how Josh ran to ground with the story.

“See this Davis guy, the part played by Burt Lancaster had been a hunting guide in the outback, out in Southern Africa probably South Africa but down in serious diamond country. One of his clients not only wanted to hunt animals but to seek what he was told were diamonds just waiting on the ground to be grabbed, grabbed by him as it turned out. Davis was not into that action but the client was and he took off one morning to cross the bushy savannah and serious dry rot desert to find them. He did but lacking proper hydration he was too weak to close the deal and dropped down on the ground ready for the grim reaper to take his hand.

“During this time Davis tracked him, found him seriously dehydrated, and after hiding the cache tried to get back to civilization to no avail. The client died. That was not the end of Davis’ troubles though since news of a huge diamond cache just waiting for somebody to grab set all kinds of wheels turning. Especially since those diamonds were on the private property of the main mining company in the area. The mining company security chief Vogel, played by Paul Henreid, you know he was the guy who played Victor Lazlo the escaped leader of the European anti-Nazi resistance in World War II who Rick, of Rick’s American Café in Casablanca gave up fetching Ilsa for on the theory that the love woes of three little people in this wicked old world don’t amount to a hill of beans when the night-takers are on a rampage, and he was right of course, played the heavy here and tried to torture Davis for the information about the whereabouts of the diamonds. Getting that haul would put a feather in his cap, put him in good with the mining company boss. No go, Davis wasn’t so brittle, got away to fight another day under better conditions and that is the backdrop to the action to follow.

“Davis, who despite his toughness, was strictly from hunger after he was banished from the guide trade decided he was strong enough to grab the diamonds a couple of years later. Of course Vogel would have a say about that, a big say since he controlled the most guns. But here is where Monty, played by Claude Rains who you will remember was the Vichy cop who wound up walking in the fog with Rick of Rick’s American Café once Rick played out that “hill of beans” theory and needed to get out of Casablanca fast and he was just the boy to do it, the mine owner has his own plan. After suffering a false rape scene with Suzanne, a local bar girl, maybe an independent street-walker they never made that easy rider stuff clear in those 1940s and 1950s movies expecting  that kids would get all worked up if they called women whores and men pimps that kind of stuff. For some filthy lucre she was to seduce Davis into telling her where the diamonds were, get the information and he would cut Vogel out. See how the lust works even with guys who have a ton of dough.                

“Well the seduction business doesn’t work on Davis and not because Suzanne did not have her charms but because along the way she turned out to be the whore with the golden heart and decided to side with him (after a couple of off-screen tumbles in the hay that off-screen another Hollywood play in those days). She was messing up his silk sheets for free on the side although like I say they didn’t spell that out for us then which might have helped clear up a lot of misunderstandings about sex, girls and what makes the world go round if they had but I will save that screed for another day.

“Naturally Davis went after the diamonds, has about six misadventures getting there. And of course you know that the evil Vogel had the “fix” in. But you know when you have a “from hunger” guy and a whore with a golden heart in a 1949 noir that Vogel was going down and things would  come up roses for Davis and Suzanne. They do since after wasting Vogel Davis made a deal with Monty for his life, free passage, a couple of rocks and Suzanne and Monty went for it. But see how that lust business did old Vogel in, and almost Davis.”

Everybody laughed but it was not an easy laugh since every man in that group in that bar that night had grown up “from hunger” and was probably wondering if the diamonds in Rope or the gold in Sierra Madre had been within their reach they might have wound up on the wrong side of the grave.