Latte At Café Lena’s Anyone-With Susie Sampson In Mind

 

By Sam Lowell

 

Lance Andrews had had to laugh at the coincidence even though the hurt inside his head which resulted from the incident made him feel kind of weird for laughing just then. Here is how it played out for those who are curious about old flames, about busted romances and, well, about the fate of coincidences. Lance had been on assignment for the small folk publication that he wrote for, American Folk Gazette, an assignment that had taken him to Saratoga Springs after an absence of maybe forty years, possibly more. For those not in the know about folk music over the past half century or so the name Saratoga Springs at one time was, and still is if less so even today, synonymous with Caffe Lena, the tiny club just off the center of the downtown area. Through those portals passed folk legends like newly minted Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Utah Philips, Rosalie Sorrels, Arlo Guthrie and a host of others too numerous to mention. Lance was in town to do a story about the old café for a new generation fairly well untouched by the wand of those previously mentioned legendary names. He had consciously failed to mention that through those portals passed Susie Sampson, an up and coming new voice folk singer back around 1975 and at one time Lance’s paramour. The coincidence? The very night that Lance had been scheduled to go to the club to drink in the atmosphere a bit the headliner was one Susie Sampson.                

But maybe we should go back a bit for the big affair between Lance and Susie and their subsequent separate paths could stand in for the vagaries of trying to survive on the edges of the music world, the edges when the early 1960s folk minute which took American campuses and other prominent locales by a storm ebbed taking no prisoners. In those days Susie had been a student at nearby Skidmore College studying music and as she entered her senior year had been wondering if the folk scene would provide her with enough income to make a career of it, at least for a while. She had grown up down the road at Clifton Park and had taken up the guitar after her parents had bought her one for a Christmas present her freshman year in high school. Susie, always shy and somewhat withdrawn around her farming family, would spent hours practicing the instrument up in her bedroom and while her talents as a guitarist were always behind her real instrument-her voice-she proved adequate enough to get into the coveted music department program at Skidmore. Through high school (and college as well) she was the prime soloist for the chorus and had initially had thoughts of a classical career. Then the folk bug hit her, the ebb of the folk bug around the time that the British invasion and “acid” rock had turned former folk devotees on to those genre.               

One night in 1965 she discovered Caffe Lena’s, with hostess Lena, a character in her own right, at the door taking admissions, and Tom Paxton on the bill. That was the night that she also found out that Lena’s had an “open mic” night on Tuesday for anybody who wanted to do a two song set (and pay the two dollar entry fee). She was excited about the prospects of performing in a non-school situation and find out whether she had the stuff to take a run at a performing career. So a few weeks later she showed up at Lena’s (Lena on the door again taking admissions) and placed herself on the list which gave the order of performances. She had decided that she would do one religious-oriented song reflecting her pious Methodist upbringing among the farming brethren having always been intrigued by that last phrase “I hear the noise of wings,”  Angel Band, and one more contemporary, a cover of Woody Guthrie’s Deportee. Needless to say she wowed the mostly student audience. What she had previously been unaware of was that talent-spotting Lena (between bouts of admission taking) had taken note of her performance and the audience’s reaction to it and had taken Susie aside before she left and asked her if she would like to be the opening act for Larry Rivers, then an up and coming talent (whose light would fade later after bouts of cocaine addiction), and a crowd-pleaser in a couple of weeks with his off-beat folk repartee. Of course she had said yes to that proposal and began the next day to put together a six song set featuring a couple of Patsy Kline tunes and a couple of Joan Baez covers thrown in along with a song she had written but had never performed in public. The night of the performance she may not have outshined Larry but if not she came close. That was also the night that Lance Andrews then a student at Siena who was in Saratoga in order to date a student at Skidmore who was the sister of his roommate. That roommate’s sister was with him that night but Lance’s eyes were all over Susie.

Later, a few weeks later, when they finally met Susie would tell him that he had made her “nervous” while he was looking at her as she was singing-nervous but wondering to herself who he was. The way Lance played his hand to meet Susie was pure Lance. As a journalism student at Siena he had finagled the editor of the school newspaper to do a “human interest” story, a story on area budding singers- a generic fluff piece but the editor, Ben Samuels, said what the hell. So that weekend he was off to Saratoga to “meet” Susie. Another Lance touch he had Lena make the introductions to add her imprimatur to his weak credentials. So Lance made like a reporter although he also peppered his interview with her with lots of personal questions that did not seem to fit with the subject he was supposed to be covering-new talent. As he finished the interview he shook Susie’s hand (she would later tell her girlfriend roommate that the shake was so gentle she had felt somewhat flush after he removed it from hers) he asked her what she was doing after her performance. Recovering smartly for such a shy young woman she said going with him for something to eat because she would be starving since she did not eat before a performance since it made her feel logy. Bingo. And that started the on again off again love affair between Susie Sampson looking for fame and the bright lights and Lance Andrews who wanted to help her get there.                                

Maybe the times were just out of joint. Maybe 1965, 1966, 1967 the years of their torrid affair mixed in with Lance trying to get his foot in the journalism door at the Albany Times and Susie was trying to break out of the confines of upstate New York, of the Caffe Lena, were just a bit too late for either to make their marks. Lance was the first to speak of making a break, of heading west to see and hear all about was brewing out there in fantasyland, out in the summer of love. Susie balked at that, said she had to get to the Village and get her break. Said she was not built for Grace Slick and Janis Joplin mixes, felt she could make a living on folk if she could just get to the big city and not have to depend on an occasional feature at Lena’s or over at Siena and Skidmore or worse, much worse working for the “basket” at Sonny Red’s in Albany. So they split-for a while. In 1969 they were back together after Lance had sowed his wild oats in California and had worked a niche for himself in the alternative newspaper scene as a “cultural” reporter meaning reviewing the myriad new groups sprouting up in the acid-rock etched night. Susie had had her moment in the Village, had done a feature at the Gaslight where she did well but she was like in a time capsule trying to get some place when there was no some place to go to.                     

They would make one more go in 1972 and by 1975 had closed out whatever it was that had flamed but now was burned to the edges. He went up to Boston and had a checkered career as a free-lance journalist mostly for old friend Ben Gold’s Spectator, had had three wives all divorced now and a slew of kids who cost him dearly for sundry college educations. Susie, a couple of years after that final split decided, prompted by her straight-laced family, to quit the folk scene. Had gotten married to a guy from her high school, had had the requisite three children and had recently been widowed when that high school friend keeled over one night after spreading seed on their fifty acre farm.     

As Lance took his seat that night in the seemingly unchanged tiny room that passed for a folk club and Susie came on to do her feature he was all eyes, like a kid.  Later, a few hours later, during intermission when they met to cut up old touches Susie would tell him that he had made her “nervous” while he was looking at her as she was singing-nervous but wondering if he was still married to wife number three. Later after cutting up those old touches with a few flirty asides thrown in Lance asked Susie what she was doing after her performance. Having found out from a mutual friend also in the audience that night that he had divorced number three she recovering smartly for such a not so shy mature woman she said going with him for something to eat because she would be starving since she did not eat before a performance since it made her feel logy. And that would start … Only at the Lena.    

Truncated Song to Woody-With Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s  “Song to Woody” In Mind

By Sam Lowell

If you happen by any state hospital these days, the ones that are still left after some ill-disposed fool decided that these misfits should walk the streets unaided to windup under newspapers on park benches pan-handling dimes for doughnuts, sad, not them though you know a place for the chronically sick not the mentally ill think about an old troubadour named Woody who spent his last wasted days in such a place, a place in Brooklyn when the deal went down but it could have been anywhere, could have been an old sailors’ merchant marine place of rest in some rundown seaport strewn across the globe since he did his duty on those flimsy transport craft (build one a day in round the clock shipyard and sinking one every other day on the icy North Atlantic seas) when it counted in the dark days of World War II when such service not recognized until much later by the government and the citizenry at large saved some bacon, somebody’s anyway. Could have been out in the dustbowl hills rolling out to the Okie plains ironically from whence our brave seaman came of age if you can imagine a dust bowl refugee two thousand miles from the foam-flecked ocean sailing the deep blue-green icy North Atlantic seas, so yes when it counted, counted too for his old compadre Cisco Houston who roamed the seas with our Woody, roamed the Village taverns and bedrooms too from all accounts in the days when a good-looking man of the West would inflame the imaginations of many a loose leaf city folk urban woman who tired of the run of the mill City College boys or got nothing but frustrated hanging under the arches of Washington Square waiting for some Long Island bravo to find his way, to find his dick if you really wanted to know what the problem was. So this man of the West came ambling, is there any better way to describe that funny sideway gait those cowboys gathered around them to show the stuff they were made of, cigarette hanging forlornly but intact from those dried country  lips and took the town by a storm and took the breathe away from those lonely exiles who found solace in the Village, Greenwich Village for those who are not familiar with how important those oases were for the misbegotten, the queer literally and figuratively, the outlaws, the goofs , the holy goofs, and every sort of misfit who needed a way station from Peoria, from Grand Island, from Utica I could go on but you get the picture. Those who could not adjust to the coming wave, the chicken in every pot, the roof over every head, the roof of a car in every garage. Yeah leave behind the safety of the cottages, those forty acres and a mule farms, those dry goods salesmen passing through smiling their slick smiles as they fatten up their order books. 

Some people wanted to hear his truth, had been waiting out in the prairie dust since Sooner days in sod-built hovels, waiting out in the Pittsburgh steel mills and shanty town existences, waiting out in the hobo jungle and wine bottle for a friend to talk to and the smell of odd-ball thrown together stews to satisfy that basic hunger the bottle hunger that unrequited one, waiting out in the desperate dust bowl refugee sweated labor camps, the sleeping under the stars riverbanks a rutted knapsack for a pillow, a few sheets of yesterday’s newspaper for cover against the ill-winds of misfortune living day by day, a beggar’s dread existence, waiting along the lonesome railroad tracks for that midnight freight fearing for the ruthless bulls and the sneaky peter companions, waiting in the bracero wetback border towns some sour wine to savor their existences when the tequila ran dry, waiting in some faraway townhouse trying to sneak out the backdoor to the Village to seek a newer way one that would be frustrated until much later when the “beat boys,” know loveless Jack, faggot Allen, street bandit Gregory, footloose Neal, brilliant busted Bull the drugstore cowboy, held sway and made those acres safe for the disinherited and the dispossessed. Yeah they waited for the herald who would usher in the new age where they could breeze anything but the fatal air of the big lie, the big red scare night, the, what did she call it, the ticky-tacky suburban cottage lady who had the deal down pat, oh yeah, the cookie cutter one size fits all existence.     

So they all waited in their simple skins for someone to tell some little truths like how this land was their land if they were brave enough to take it back, take back, what did Scotty boy call it when the Dutchies turned the corner from the washed up seas, yeah, that green fresh breast of the new world that had been grabbed by the greed-heads of every age from the second awakening hustle to the robber barons to the slick financiers who took their cut of every deal or there was no deal, spoke to those ready to take back the simple sense of innate solidarity that with each generation got dissipated with each new loss of indemnity from the vultures and the night-takers. Grabbed the land, the precious land that could only sustain so much abuse, could only find service in reclamation and tender care. Waited for somebody to notice that the desperately poor, the transient laborer, needed a voice, the voiceless needed a voice in each generation and by the process of selection called Woody’s card, called out for his innate sense of what aided the misbegotten world and what they could count on. Explained, patiently explained that some folks robbed you with a pistol but far worse that some did so with a fountain pen and maybe the rage should have accompanied that sense as well. Some guys speak truth to power without the accolades, without knowing they spoke to some common decencies spoke to power and got knocked over their heads for their efforts and then got off their knees and dust the pads going back for another round.

Some oracle, some later troubadour said it best that Woody spoke to the free-born instinct of those who left the hard-boiled, hard-scrabble East, the enclosed uptight East when you think about the matter closely to head out to the unknown not really knowing what the new land would look like not knowing whether they could hold the damn thing once they got there. These were funny pioneers, the wanderers, the restless ones what did one sociologist call them, yes, the master-less men who bore the backbreaking task of freeing the new land after the  old land was exhausted (and which they had taken part of crumbling apart but that is a story for another day), the gypsy rovers, the con man, the whoremongers too but mostly those who could not hack it in the East or had been run out by the hard boys (just as their forebears had been run out of the countries from whence they came sometimes just before the nooses descended). So they sought to get washed clean again, sought change the way truth was running against them then. Grew tired of Mister and his wanting habits, his grab and his pleasures. Grew fearful that he would be crushed under the weight of another man’s weight. Thought about man’s misdeeds and madness too. A lot for a single man to roll up that hill only to have it tumble down on his head.      

And then the quiet, the silence, as Woody descended into his own family-carrying madness, could no longer put pen to paper to speak his truth (one wonders if he had had a word processer in those days fixed up to his fevered brain what he would have been able to say to a candid world). Still they came to learn of his words the way he put them, the simple chords that drove the words, the three chords that got many a man a hearing, and looks from startled girls in cashmere sweaters and write the words that put to shame the breezeway denizens, the gold coast golf course country club loungers and the drifters out of dreams. Yeah think of that coughing bleeding exile out in Brooklyn where the hospital used to contain his last dreams. Think about Saint Woody of the street of dreams and sharply-etched words.   

The Be-Boppingest Girl In Town-With Lucy Larkin In Mind

 

By Fritz Taylor

 

Back in the “Acre” section, the working poor section, of Riverdale a town about fifty miles outside of Boston it mattered, mattered a lot in the late 1950s about who the be-boppingest girl in town. Mattered to guys like Cy Dolan, Jumbo Callahan(not Johnny but his cousin), Sax McGee, Jimmy Cline and an assortment of other passing through characters who spent time, hanging out time in front of Sully’s Variety Store (although it is not germane to the serious question of who was the be-boppingest girl in town Sully’s Variety was merely a front for Johnny Sulllivan’s bookie operation which was so publicly known as such that one could see the cop cars lined up in front on occasion trying to lay down some last minute bet at Aqueduct or some such place). Maybe a generation before, the generation who hung around Sully’s during the Great Depression and World War II and then moved on such a question was not a subject of intense conversation and controversy come girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights among the brethren but just then no subject was hotter. Reason: in the age of rock and roll, the age of the music of those who came of age in the post-World War II period who, or what girl had that certain style, those certain moves on the dance floor and was a fox to boot was on the tip of the al the guys at Sully’s tongues. Probably in other corners as well but we shall only draw a bee-line for the “Acre” and let others speak for themselves.        

This be-boppingest question was uppermost on the mind of one Cy Dolan, the eldest son of the Dolan clan (and who cousins were the notorious Johnson brothers, four all told, who as part of the Jimmy Clanton gang robbed the Granite National Bank of a pretty penny but don’t mention those boys around Grandmother Dolan not unless you want spitfire and damnation) and probably the best football player who every graced the halls of Riverdale High. So a guy who was the toast of the athletic world, one of the few worlds that counted most in the “Acre” had to be very conscious of that eternal girl question because he might very likely have to decide for real who was, and was not, the real be-bop thing since a legendary football hero in old time working class Riverdale was expected to have the best looking girl in school. But given the nature of those times, the time of free-wheeling rock and roll, mere looks and showing great curves from breast to ankles was only one factor in deciding who be-bopped best.

There were certainly plenty of girls around who had shapes to die for and pretty faces Sarah Goodwin, Cherry Dale, and Christie McNamara were certainly in that league. But see Sarah was some kind of evangelical Protestant whose parents refused to permit to her to go to school dances, to hang around Johnny’s bowling alleys and certainly not the secluded lovers’ lane part of Riverdale Park along the Talbot River. (Sarah later would break from her parents, her parents religion and their strictures eventually becoming a successful model in New York City and even have her photograph for all the world to see in Playboy magazine and would under those circumstances been a serious candidate but she blossomed just a little too late.) Cherry Dale was rumored to have some college Joe from State U  on her ass and never did show up for the high school dances to strut her stuff except once for the sophomore mixer but that was before she filled out a bit (she would eventually marry that Joe and as far as anybody knew stayed with him forever). Christie McNamara had been attached to Johnny Callahan (remember not Jumbo) since about sixth grade. (They would eventually marry and stay married as Johnny became Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and Christie Mrs. Toyota.)  So even if all three could have danced the dance of the seven veils and done a strip tease in the middle of the school gym to boot they were not contenders (Cy had noticed that Cherry when she had obliged him with a dance or two at the Spring Frolics that sophomore year before wasn’t that good a dancer and Christie danced so close to Johnny that nobody could righteously tell if she could dance or not).            

Who was Cy kidding in any case. Lucy Larkin was the only girl who could make guys thing evil (or as the case may be good) thoughts about getting her alone along that deserted stretch of Riverdale Park. She had looks, no question, brownish blonde hair, blue eyes, a bright smile, a great shape and long white legs that guys, even guys with ball and chain girlfriends, would wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats about. Not only that but she filled out that shape with tight-fitting cashmere sweaters that showed her breasts to great effect and with tight skirts that showed her great ass. So she sent a flamed out look just short of a “bad” girl but no question just short because Lucy was one of the smartest girls in her class. But as Cy thought about the matter she was perhaps a half notch above those other beauties and the brains didn’t hurt either. But what made her bop was when she got out on that dance floor and let the world see that form making some very provocative moves without being that “bad” girl that a lot of girls were striving to look like after having seen too many grade B-films where the bad girls got all the attention and all the dates (although nobody asked about how many had to go see “Aunt Emma” for several months and as a result not finish high school).     

Cy had on the night after the Autumn Leaves dance that started off the school dance season awakened in a cold sweat thinking about Lucy dancing on the top of tables on the side of the gym when the DJ played Warren Smith’s Rock and Roll Ruby. Thought about how she arched that back of hers, how she let her dress slide up just so to give every guy in the place an eyeful, how those firm breasts tilted just so. Maybe he should have taken a cold shower right then. But right then he resolved that, yeah, Lucy Larkin was the be-boppingest girl in town and he better get to her fast.

 

The Harp Beneath The Crown-With The Irish “Acre” In Mind 

By Seth Garth 

 

A word. Bob Johnson didn’t know a shabeen from a shillelagh but he was as Irish, was as driven by Irish passions as anyone who had ever come out of the Shamrock-drenched Acre section, the working poor section, of Riverdale out about fifty miles west of Boston (the river part came a few hundred years ago from its proximity to the small branch of the Connecticut River that bordered the town). For a fact, for a blessed hard-earned fact, he was not subjected to like his best friend Tommy Riley, best friend since about third grade in Miss Jacobs’ class where they met on the first day of school, the whole nine yards of the Irish litany but he grabbed most of the aura as he learned later when it counted for something.

Learned the inevitable eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny to the poor Irish peasant forbears who took it on the chin, especially since Cromwell’s time when “they” with their foreign tongues and foreign ways came and upended the land, grabbed every blessed thing that was good and proper, later the famine ships that brought later forbears to Amerika, and the eternal struggle to be free not consummated until after the events of the glorious uprising of Easter 1916 of song and legend (that latter something of a misbegotten myth created after formal independence since the “shawlies” of  Dublin originally spit on the work of the boyos in 1916 worried more about their paid packets sent from sons enmeshed in the damn British Army then slogging in the trenches in France). The equally inevitable bowing down before the dictates (from the dictator Pope such a word if uttered then would have stirred cries of blasphemy and mortal sin) with the decree to multiply, to out-populate the bloody Protestant wherever an Irishman laid down his head. The decrees to keep holy the holies, the prayer book in hand and to avoid like the devil (remember Adam’s grievous sin, the sin that took humankind east of Eden, out of the Garden) tempting any young colleens who had their rosaries around their dainty hands and their Bibles between their knees. And naturally the covenant to not “air the family dirty linen, the why of why was sister sent away to see Aunt Bernice, the why of why was brother Jimmy doing a hard five for armed robbery, to name a few secrets, in public. In short all that distinguished the life of the shanty Irish from the shanty Protestants whose betters ran the town still and whose religion cast them to the gates of hell.             

Our Bob Johnson was “spared” all that, or so he thought later on when he did seek out his Irish heritage, did see in that seeking that he had been as branded by the verities of their existence as Tommy had been. See Bob was the product of a “mixed” marriage, the marriage of a daughter of Hibernia and one of those bloody Protestants. Worse not even a local bloody Protestant, a known quantity of Methodist or Episcopalian, but a bloody Primitive Baptist (the real name for that denomination to distinguish it from other branches of those heathen faiths) from down in Appalachia, down in coal country, down in Hazard, Kentucky a name to conjure with in story and song. The how of that liaison had been a simple accident, an accident called World War II to hear Grandmother Dolan tell the sordid details (her term). Prescott Johnson had been stationed at the Riverdale Naval Depot after having seen his fair share of battles with the Marines in the Pacific wars while waiting his discharge papers. One night he had met Delores Dolan at a USO dance in Worchester and the “shiek,” the name that his Marine buddies called him which had been culled from his attractive to the ladies from down in Appalachia all the way to Camp Pendleton enbarkment ports had attached himself to her (and she to him).

After Prescott’s discharge from the Marines he and Delores had been married in the rectory of the Sacred Heart Church, the Dolan family church and good girl Delores’ favorite spot growing up. That rectory business which caused no end of anguish to Grandmother Dolan among her Riverdale ‘shawlie” friends had been necessary since a “heathen” Protestant could not be married in the main church to a believer, no way, and maybe it was the same today although Bob now far from the religion of his birth had not kept up with the doing of the old bastard Church of late. The other stipulation was that any children of that woe begotten marriage would be raised in the faith. And so they were. And so also those Primitive Baptists proved to be as prolific at reproduction as the bloody Irishman and produced, begot is what Preston proudly called his actions in his old age like some Old Testament patriarch, five sons before giving up the game.                    

That five son brood was nothing but a mistake, a social mistake that would have consequences not only of making Bob, the youngest son, aware of his Irish heritage in some oddly moving ways, but that would cause more anguish and teeth-gnashing that would have seemed possible to those two love-birds who exchanged vows that day in that benighted rectory in front of the disbelieving priest. Prescott, as it turned out, something that he was proud of but which others in Riverdale put to laughter to, was the son of a coal miner, had been a coal miner himself before he jumped the pits when the “Nips” invaded Pearl Harbor and he ran double-time to the recruiting offices to sign up rather than take his chance in the mines. He had regretted many thing but not that decision to leave the worn-out mines around Hazard.  The laughter part was that there was not a blessed coal mine within three hundred miles of Riverdale.  

This “joke,” cruel as it turned out, was to cause more hellishness than that poor benighted man deserved. Whatever teenage desires and passions had stirred Delores Prescott’s way got tangled up with the hard fact that Prescott was an unskilled laborer and hence even in the “golden age” 1950s subject to the harsh last hired, first fired (or laid off meaning the same thing when you had five hungry close in age boys to feed) rule of the jungle. And so to shanty Irish the “Acre” did Delores and her brood descend from the lace curtain Irish of her young girlhood. It was not a pretty sight, not pretty at all and she never really adjusted to the downward swoop.        

But she did raise the boys in the faith of her maidenhood, did make sure that they went to church on Sunday and made their yearly obligations, did their repetitive confessions which only grew more frequent as they grew older. Did make sure they had their seemingly annual for a while first communions, got confirmed and a fistful of other non-pagan rituals which took each boy in turn a long time to break from, to do good or evil, mostly the latter among the older boys. Despite that, despite all her entreaties she could not keep the four older boys from the wrong road, could not keep them from the lure of the wise guys who hung around Sully’s Variety Store and later around Sully’s Tavern (owned by the variety store owner’s brother who was using the store as a front for his bookie operation which was out in plain sight and even the cops on the beat placed their bets with old Sully). Could not keep them from their in turn jail time for assorted misdemeanors and felonies.

But that was their stories and their mother’s too not Bob’s who as the youngest after the older four boys turned out “bad” got picked up as a favorite by Grandfather Dolan (and to a lesser extent Grandmother Dolan too although she was as swayed as any “shawlie” by the bad ends of the older boys who she practically disowned once they went on their thieving ways). And maybe that extra attention made a slight difference for the old man was an uncanny and unrepentant Irish nationalist of the old school, meaning he sided with likes of James Connolly, the Commandant of the Irish Citizens Army in Easter 1916 not so much for his socialist vision as for hip pluck in taking on the bloody occupying British Army while they were in the throes of a life and death struggle in the field of mud-strewn France (and hence the old saying once again proved true that Mother England’s misfortune was Ireland’s fortune). Had had a cousin, once removed, Seamus who had fought the good fight at the Post Office with the brave lads (and Bob was later to find out brave woman as well but Grandfather Dolan was old-fashioned in that way as well about the women) and had barely escaped the clutches of the British with his life. The old man would forever curse the British for burning down the town, burning down Dublin, until at a very old age he realized that it was not their town they were burning down so it might as well have been in deepest Africa for all they cared.    

 

Meant too that Bob whom he always called “Robert my boyo” had his ears filled from early on about the whole freaking eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny, spitting out of the bastard Cromwell’s name, and of the exploits of the Fenian Brotherhood and of course endless details about 1916 and the fights after independence.          

All of that did not sink in until “the troubles” began up in the North in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was necessary to move from off the dime-to support the fight against the Protestant heathen who were down-pressing the Irish Catholic minority something like the ghost of his grandfather’s bull sessions came up and seized him in a fit of shamrock patriotism. He would raise serious money for the boyos and later never regretted like some did that the money bought guns and ammo. Thought back every time some frightened Irish politician would call on the diaspora to not supply the bravos with such “toys” to his grandfather’s words about the boys of 1916 taking guns from the Germans in their fight-in war the rules don’t mean a damn thing winning does and losing means the hang them high gallows. Yeah, so Tommy Riley, now the late Tommy Riley of blessed memory, was not the only one who got the drill who lived to see his green side blossom for all the world to see. And, hell, to this day Bob Dolan still does not know a shabeen from a shillelagh.

Honky-Tonk Man-The Times and Troubles of Hank Williams-I Saw The Light (2015)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

I Saw The Light, starring Tom Huddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, 2015  

I remember one time several years ago in reviewing a Hank William Golden Classic CD telling the story that although I was Northern born boy I had actually been down in the South while I was in my mother’s womb. Now that would not be of any particular note except somehow country music long suppressed was in my genes, made up my DNA since I did not find out until much later that my own father played in a country music band, did covers of Hank Williams’ songs so you can see where I have made a special exception when it comes to Hank. My late mother told me that my father would sing Cold, Cold Heart to me to quiet me down as a baby. So except for maybe an outlaw country minute in the early 1980s when country music was moving away from Nashville and the Grand Old Opry restraints Hank is the only member of that genre I give a bye to. And off of a viewing of the film under review, I Saw The Light, I made no mistake in that decision.    

Probably everybody knows a Hank Williams song, or a cover of it because almost everybody from pop to folk to rock and roll has tipped his or her hat to the man, one example no question being the elusive Bob Dylan who as shown in an old time documentary Don’t Look Back even in his most folky heyday was sitting up in his hotel room in some far off land singing The Lost Highway.  (You can see that segment on YouTube). I have chosen that particular song because Hank’s whirlwind live aptly fits the lyrics to the song. The film deals in passing with his young life starting out being escorted everywhere by a very demanding mother who had some sense that her son was a notch above the hokey stuff that was passing for country music back in the mid to late 1940s when Hank began to make his mark. Deals as well with the usual musician’s dilemma of getting a hearing from some record company who will take a chance on the performer.

The heart of the film though deals with the other stuff besides the music. First off his stormy love-hate relationship with his first wife Audrey who drove him crazy (and he she) and which created the ups and downs of his life. Then there was the drinking and drugs (the drug part as usual with all performers then keep hidden by a wall sealed with seven seals). The physical medical problems too some of which contributed to his early death. And the other women, including wife number two, which gave him his reputation as a honky-tonk man as per the title of this entry. 

But in the end you really do have to go back the music, the incredible number of songs that he wrote and that were serious hits in that short six year span when he was the king-hell-king of the hill in country music. More than that though the effect of music can be summed up in the scene in the film where he was being interviewed by a reporter who asked him why he was so popular. Answer: his songs made the average listener forget about their woes. That was a heavy burden to carry, in the end too heavy. See this well-done film with great covers of Hanks’s songs done in his style and with his energy. 

With Skip James’ Lyric I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man In Mind-Why I Won’t Vote For Hillary Clinton (Needless To Say Dump The Trump Too)

By Fritz Taylor

Okay, let’s go by the numbers. Sometime in maybe late 2007, early 2008 in any case before it became clear that one Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would pose a serious challenge to then Senator Hillary Clinton of New York I had been bombarded with a few books written probably by minions or otherwise tied to the Clinton brand name. As such things go they were political biographies commissioned to advance Mrs. Clinton’s ultimately ill-fated campaign or material to be used a sound bite fodder for the same purposes. I was asked by some serious political people, maybe political pimps is the better way to put the matter to get on board her train or at least review the various books to let people outside her direct camp know how good a candidate, how well-qualified she was and so on. I balked at such an insidious task although I did to my subsequent regret review some items for which I was sent to the gallows by those same serious political folk. (At that point I had not particular animus against the relatively unknown Obama although I was subsequently to have many a vile word to say against him and his endless wars and endless bullshit about a “post-racial” society and the sand in my mouth “hope” noise he spouted).         

My vantage point for writing about the various Clinton works was encapscalated almost perfectly by the old sweet falsetto-voiced bluesman from the late 1920s Skip James, who would be “discovered” by us budding folkies in the 1960s folk minute and have a second short career before passing on, in a signature song of his-Devil Got My Woman. The key line which I used shamelessly every time I could during the early part of that campaign year before I gave up covering the whole thing as one more act of futility for those of us who were serious about social change and who furthermore had no illusions in anything any candidate speaking for the Democratic Party of war and corruption had to say-“I’d rather be with the devil than be that woman’s man.” (Needless to say the various Republicans were and are beyond the pale and not worth even a sardonic look.) That very factual comment got me in hot water with some of my die-hard Clinton supporter friends (mostly politically savvy women looking to launch the first woman into the barren American presidency). But it also got me in Dutch with my more radically-inclined feminist friends who saw my comment as “sexist,” misanthropic and misogynous. Jesus didn’t they do their own castigations and aspirations against that woman for her lug-head vote with both hands for the Iraq War resolution which still lives with us burnt in our memoires for seemingly all eternity.   

Come 2016 and the age of Dump the Trump supposedly a greater threat to the American democracy than the “reds under every bed” of the red scare Cold War rhetoric of my youth back in the early 1960s and those same cohorts have taken once again to making the same silly accusations about my Neanderthal attitude (I am being kind to myself here since their language was significantly more heated that I care to quote). But everybody knows that bourgeois politics, hell, any politics is a tough dollar so for those who forgot my retort back then about my socially backward ways I am resurrecting my talisman-my defense.     

You see the blues lyrics, folk music in general, is almost always open to copying and tweaking. So the great modern (and very feminist) blues singer Rory Block came to my rescue after I remembered that she had done a version of Skip James’ song. Except naturally when she sang the song she said- I’d rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Touché. I used the masculine version of that statement when somebody asked me if I supported Barack Obama for President in 2008. (I supported the very black, the very beautiful, and very feminist ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in her Green Party-etched efforts and Jill Stein of the same party in hers this year so there). I use the feminine version this year for Mister Clinton once again. Oh yeah, and Dump The Trump.       

I’m Going Away My Own True Love-With Bob Dylan’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather” In Mind   

By Sam Lowell

Lana Jamison had been frustrated for most of her twenty-eight young life years. Frustrated by her whole past, her past that included a serious bout of a childhood where she was not listened to by her parents, was treated like dishrag, was told to be silent and like it by her tyrannical father and her go-along-with-father mother. Had spent years in therapy after college trying to get to the bottom of what that dishrag business did to her psyche and had come up with few good clues as to how to proceed with her life without feeling she had to look over her shoulder every time she made a remark that expressed her true feelings. That situation had been made worse by the seemingly inevitable run of boyfriends and lovers who had decided on the basis of her demur presence that they could treat her like a dishrag as well. They collectively with few bright spots which usually didn’t last because of Lana’s moodiness  didn’t feel the need to expect that she might have an opinion of her own and tried might and main to direct her life for her. That woeful series included one husband, Jeff Mullins, who made an art form of putting her down wherever she had an idea that did not jell with his. That marriage had fallen apart of its own weight after a couple of years when Jeff decided one night to run off with the next best thing that came along and left Lana cold.     

Then Fritz, Fritz Taylor came along, came along like a fresh breeze after that disaster with Jeff. She had met him one night when she was feeling lonely at a bar in Cambridge that she would frequent before her marriage to Jeff and where they played country music of all things in the heart of Harvard Square. That country music thing had been a throwback to her days on that silent father upstate New York hard-scrabble truck farm and he would play the stuff on the radio every day. Fritz’s interest had been more recent, what he called his outlaw country music minute when that genre had a run even in urban areas of this country. The Wheat-stack had been playing, a group that he followed and which played Willie Nelson covers among others and so he had shown up there one Friday night and kissed fate. He had spied her, so he said, while he was sitting a bit forlorn at the bar since he had recently been divorced from his own didn’t understand him wife. Spied her sitting like heaven’s own angel at  a corner table with her girlfriend, so he said as he told her as she passed by his bar stool as she was going to the Ladies’ Room. She had been impressed by his light touch when he invited her to sit down upon her return from the Ladies’ Room, his giving her room to speak about what interested her, and most of all by the no pressure way that he handled the idea of calling her up once she insisted that she really had to go home with her girlfriend and not with him someplace. But she gave him her phone number. In response he gave her the most gentle good night handshake she had ever received from a man. And so started their love affair.           

Fritz proved, mostly, to be as advertised that first night, except his own bouts of withdrawal and distance which he told her he had inherited from his own dismal childhood down among the working poor by parents who were way over their heads trying to raise six kids on an unskilled worker’s pay. He called them, he and she, soulmates and that stuck, stuck as true as anything he ever said. Lana could take those bouts of darkness for a while as long as they were mixed in with days of happiness. But that mix had of late fallen on hard times. Many times burned she needed some space, needed room to think things through and so one day she mentioned to Fritz that she wanted to head to California by herself, wanted drive across at her own pace and see the country she had missed seeing all her sweet young life. They battled back and forth on the matter for weeks. Fritz telling her that he would improve his disposition and she, having heard it all before and really wanting to get away, arguing for her space. Finally one morning out of the blue he gave in, wished her Godspeed and that she should keep in contact with him in case anything happened along the way. The idea being when she left that she would return and they would try to start over again, start their love on a higher plain.                

So one sunny April day Lana took off in her Chevrolet, a car filled to the brim with seemingly every possible thing that she owed. No pioneer woman trekking across the country bare-boned and intrepidly, not Lana. Told Fritz as they kissed good-bye that she would call him when she hit Philadelphia. Would see when she got there if she couldn’t find him some nice gift to make him feel better, make him get through their separation better. Fritz said in reply simply that he didn’t want any material gift but that the thought of her speedy return was enough to keep him going. That brought a tear to her eyes but she still insisted that she would get him something. So in Philadelphia she called him up one night and asked him if he wanted a nice gold ring that she had seen in a jewelry store that would be a sign of their friendship and love. Fritz begged off again saying he only wanted her own sweet love. They left it at that for a while, didn’t speak of the matter of a gift again when they talked on the phone every couple of days.          

Out in Denver she made a call one night asking Fritz once again whether he wanted a beautiful silver Native American-made bracelet that she knew he had mentioned that he would like to have one time when they had gone to an Intertribal Festival out in Charlton one fall. This time Fritz got his hind legs up, started getting angry since he had previously made it clear that all he wanted was for her to stop roaming and come back home. Did she find another guy in her travels? No, she said almost too quickly. Then he told her that she must not be thinking very highly of him, must have been more interested in travelling and being free to stop and go as she liked. Maybe wanted to stay in California since she had not stopped talking about it for weeks before her departure. Maybe Fritz wasn’t good enough for her. No, no she kept saying with less and less conviction. They got off the phone not on the best of terms. Fritz had asked when she expected to be home again.  Her non-committal answer she had said she was not sure, a few weeks many a month, maybe more. Fritz was steaming.      

One hot late summer night Lana called from Phoenix and before she could say much of anything Fritz said that he would wish her Godspeed and hoped that she would be happy in California as long as she expected to stay there. He was bailing out. Had had it. Before he got off the phone realizing where she was then in the heart of Native-American country he told Lana that she could sent him one of those  Native-American-made silver bracelets that she had mentioned in that  earlier conversation. Enough said.