In The Time Of The 1950s Be-Bop Baby-Boomer Jail Break-Out- Out In The Seal Rock Night

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

 

With a short introduction by Sam Lowell

 

I first met Josh Breslin several months after my old corner boy high school friend, the late Peter Paul Markin, brought him around our hang-out, Jack Slack’s bowling alley, in the winter after the summer of love, 1967 (or is it Summer of Love, 1967 I have seen it both ways) out in San Francisco when Josh had gone up on to Russian Hill searching for dope, marijuana at the time the drug of choice among the newly liberated from uptight-ness about the evils of such pleasures, and ran into Markin asking him if he had a joint. Markin, freshly dropped out of college (Boston University) in order to “find himself” had been travelling on one of the ubiquitous psychedelically-painted converted yellow brick road school buses with Captain Crunch (road moniker which we would all take once we hit the road as some form of liberation from tired out old names) for a few months and had been staying in the park on the hill waiting, waiting for anything at all to happen told Josh “here light this one up, but ‘don’t bogart that joint’ when you are done because we save every twig to build up enough for the pipe.” And with that a 1960s-type friendship started, one that would have them travelling together over the next several years (minus Markin’s two years in the Army in Vietnam but that is a story for another time) until Josh lost touch with him before he took that last fatal trip to Mexico where he was murdered by parties unknown after a busted drug deal and is now resting in an unmarked grave in potter’s field in Sonora and moaned over to this day by his old friends, including Josh and me.

 

Markin often said, and it proved to be true, that despite a couple of years difference in age and despite the fact that Josh had grown up in Olde Saco in Maine, an old-time textile mill town, his life story, the things that drove him in his younger days were remarkably similar to ours down in North Adamsville, an old industrial town about twenty miles south of Boston. That was why they got along on the road out West and why we who took to the road with Markin later once we got the bug to move along got along with Josh as well. Josh is today an honorary North Adamsville corner boy when we, the remnants still living anyway, get together to speak of those times. (And always wind up with some mention of some madcap, maniacal thing Markin did which only gets us mistier about the bastard these days.)

 

Recently a bunch of us, Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader now a big-time lawyer in Boston (“of counsel” these days whatever that means other than big dough for saying word one to a client), Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Lefty Malone, Josh and me got together at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge to have a few drinks and swap a few lies. As we were walking down Massachusetts Avenue toward Jack’s we spotted a restored ’57 Chevy which we all craved when we were in high school (usually owned by the sons or daughters, mainly sons, who had had their father’s give them their “old car” when they traded up for say a non-descript ’61 Chevy). So you know the subject of that old time “boss” car came up that night. Josh, who is a writer of sorts, a music reviewer mostly these days from what he says, wrote up something about his relationship to those now classic “boss” cars and what they meant to guys who came of age in the late 1950s. Here is what he had to say:                         

 

A while back I was on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in an extensive rock and roll series, you know those “oldies, but goodies” compilations pitched to, uh, a certain demographic, an ARRP-worthy demographic, okay. A lot of those reviews had been driven by the artwork which graced the covers of each CD container, both to stir ancient memories and to rather truly reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation, the generation of ’68, who lived and died by the music. That “generation of ’68” designation picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.     

 

Most of the artwork, at most, simply allured to that backdrop. Rather what that work suggested was who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may be, to the themes of those artwork scenes. (I would later see a ’57 Chevy in Cambridge one night with a bunch of guys I have known forever who got together for a few drinks and that sighting only reinforced my desire to write something up about the subject.) The one cover I am thinking of right now is a case of the latter, of not fitting in. On this cover, as I recall, an early 1960s summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had at least the feel of our generational breakout with school out and in the Northeast the ability to shed layers of clothing and winter gloom), a summer night scene, a lovers’ lane summer’s night scene, with a  non-described as such but clearly “boss” Corvette front and center car scene to spell it  all out, to put a stake right through the heart of this car-less teen, no car soon in sight teen, and no gas money, etc., etc. even if I had as much as an old Nash Rambler junk car. But my aim is not to speak bitterness today, although I do want to talk car dream, Corvette car dream, okay.

 

I have ranted endlessly about the 1950s as the “golden age of the automobile” and I am not alone (cars today that when one goes to an automobile museum or looks on-line at cars from the period realizes that whatever cool design they might have had they certainly were monsters by today’s small efficient ecological-friendly cars which while useful no sullen teenager is going to moon over). As perceptive a social critic and observer as Tom Wolfe, he of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and many other youth nation tribal gathering-type book screeds, did a whole book on the California car culture, the “hot rod “ culture, the California post- World War II disposable income teen car culture that drifted east and “infested” plenty of young working- class kids in that time, the time of white tee-shirts, jeans, maybe a leather jacket against life’s storms, and of endless grease monkey tune-ups to get that engine revved just right. Moreover, nostalgia-driven George Lucas’s American Graffiti of 1973 is nothing but an ode to that good-night teen life, again California-style amped up to the core of today’s baby-boomer demographic.

 

Sure, and as that car wind drifted back east Sammy the local wizard, the local car wizard, had all the girls, all the good-looking girls hanging around his home garage just waiting to be “selected” for a ride in Sammy’s latest effort, usually some variation off a ’57 Chevy. (That “home” nothing but a trailer, a not very large trailer which served Sammy’s slight domestic needs the garage with state-of-the-art car tools or whatever Sammy could borrow or steal was the center of attraction.) There the thing though that might gall certain guys, certain guys who had their notions of “cool” derived from the cinematic young stars Marlon Brando and James Dean, Sammy, believe me, was nothing but very average for looks. A high school drop-out too (he said he had cars and girls what did he need school for anyway and you could hardly fault his logic when he put it that way despite all the high school’s endless campaigns to keep kids, especially guys in school). But get this, old bookish writer here, old two-thousand facts and don’t stop counting writer here, got exactly nowhere even with the smart girls in Sammy-ruled land. That was how tight Sammy’s rule was on the car dream night.

 

And one girl, a girl, Donna White, a school smart girl always on the honor roll, who was supposed to be my girl, something like that, once Sammy even gave her a look, a look, for crying out loud (which I didn’t see, honest), as he passed by in that two-toned (white and red) ’57 Chevy said this to me the very next day when she gave me the brush-off (after spending that night out with Sammy although I didn’t know that part until a long time afterwards) - “ Yah, get away kid, ‘cause Sammy is the be-bop daddy of the Eastern ocean night. And books and book-knowledge, well you have old age for books but a ’57 Chevy is now.” This from a girl who eventually went to Colby College. And here is the unkindest cut of all as she tore out my heart -"go wait for the bus at the bus stop, little boy. Sammy rules here."

 

But a man can dream, can’t he? And even Sammy, greased up, dirty fingernails, blotched tee-shirt, admitted, freely admitted, that he wished, wished to high heaven that he had enough dough for the upkeep on a Corvette the ding-dong-daddy (his word) “boss” (my word) car of the age and nothing but a magnet for even smarter and better looking girls than the neighborhood girls that “harassed” him. ( I found out later that this “harassed” was nothing but a nothing thing because come Friday or Saturday night he had more than his fair share of companions down by the seashore-everything is alright night, including that perfidious Donna.) Still Corvette meant big dough and as the scene in that CD cover indicated, probably big “new money” California daddy rich kid dough to look out at the Hollywood Hills or Laguna Beach night. Yah, that was the dream, and that window-fogged Seal Rock night part too (the local lovers’ lane down at the far end of Olde Saco Beach up in Maine where I grew up but you fill in your own lovers’ lane locale).

 

And whether you were a slave to your car (or not, as with this writer whose main way of travelling was that Donna cut “bus” and who depended on his corner boys to come through to go cruising, what was it Tom Waits called it, oh yeah, looking for the heart of Saturday night, down Olde Saco Boulevard), be it ’57 Chevy, Corvette or just that old beat down, beat around Nash Rambler borrowed from dad with the stipulation that you mow the lawn for the next six years or some such slave acts, you had that radio glued, maybe literally, to the local rock station to hear the tunes that made us jump into that  good night.