This blog has been established to provide space for stories, comments, and reflections on old North Quincy, your thoughts or mine. And for all those who have bled Raider red.
From Out In The 1960s Night- The Lady With The Botticelli Smile
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
She had been behind him and had asked him for some spare change, nothing more. Normally requests for spare change, in Harvard Square where he was just then, Park Street, Kenmore Square or wherever he happened to be where pan-handlers grew like trees went through him like water since the beggar usually was some surly life-time drunk looking for the next bottle and the scab-filled, ragged, and smelly figure that confronted him could be dismissed out of hand. But this was 1967, the fall of 1967, after the summer of love and so, as likely as not, young hipsters, young men and women who were dropping out of the nine to five society, for a while anyway, but who either from circumstances or studied will decided to evade that bourgeois society could be found pan-handling for their daily needs in a sea of other young people who too were questioning a world that they had not created, and had not been asked about by their elders. So when he heard that sweet gentle good night voice in back of him he stopped out of curiosity since he had never been asked by a woman for spare change before, not at least out in the streets.
When he did turn around he saw nothing but a vision of some ancient Botticelli portrait, although with her silky brown hair she was just a tad too dark-haired for a Botticelli model for that artist, if he remembered correctly, ran to blondes, or brownish blondes. That brown hair all braided at the ends, a face filled to the brim with dangling brown eyes, ruby red lips (natural, no lipstick as was becoming the fashion among women then), slender, an indeterminate figure since she was full-blown garmented in some shapeless thing (also becoming the fashion, earth mother fashion) covered with shawls and a ton of beads to ward off, well, ward off evil probably. And then that smile, that wordless smile, that spoke of adventures and nighttime pillows, that not quite Mona Lisa smile, a smile that would leave you guessing but a smile that held promise to both cause great joy, and great madness sorrow before she was through with you. A smile like that smile that Vivian Leigh, the actress, smiled just before she gave that wilting “I’ve always depended on the kindnesses of strangers” look in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. Yes, just that look that would take a man down every known path, for good or evil, but take him down nevertheless.
She softly repeated that request and as he fished his pockets for some change, for some dollars if he had them, he was in a minor turmoil about whether to hit on her or to just let it pass. After handing her a couple of dollars and some change, and she just as softly as her request said thank you she made his decision for him as she walked away to ply her trade at her next target. For the rest of the day he kept thinking about that encounter, and that night, a little restless, he had a dream about her.
In the dream he dreamed that he had given her the money, and had been quick enough to engage her in a conversation. He had dream given her a name, some ancient name, Rowena, a name to spark ancient thoughts of fair maidens in distress. And of gallants to ease that situation. She laughed, called him silly, a romantic, but did take up his offer to have a cup of coffee with him at the Hayes-Bickford. He bought her lunch and they talked for hours there and later down by the Charles River although she, as was also becoming a fashion, did not want to talk about her past, about any previous sorrows or previous madnesses. She, they, he, were to be of the moment. He, as it turned out, was okay with that, and she went home with him after she picked up her rucksack and bedroll that a friend in Allston was holding for her. Thus their short sweet affair started.
Short and sweet since his fair Rowena made it clear to him that not only was she not going to dwelt on her, his, their pasts but that she was going to be a rolling stone-meaning 1967 meaning- that she had no strings attached to her and that she would see, and sleep with, whomever struck her fancy. And that was fine by him, he being very dream liberal and very a child of his age. Fine with him until she did not come home one night and he was distraught beyond compare. He confronted her, she got ready to pack her things, but he waved that off. That happened a couple more times and then one night he got very angry, an anger he couldn’t explain, and an anger that left her off the hook when she walked out the door and he didn’t wave her off. Then he awoke from his dream, awoke in a sweat.
The next afternoon he purposefully went over to Harvard Square to see if his Rowena was there. As he was looking a soft voice came from behind him asking if he had any spare change. He turned around and there she was with her Botticelli looks and that smile, that same “depend on the kindnesses of strangers” smile she gave him the previous day. He nervously fished in his pockets for some money, passed it over to her, and as he moved on then she again wandered to her next target. He never saw her again…
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company performing the bluesy classic, Piece Of My Heart.
Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some fogged memory accompanying CD booklet of a wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. In the time of our time. Belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing from somewhere beyond a no good man, no job, no roof over a head, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or down town “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay. ******* Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then.
Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.
Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.
What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.
Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).
Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain is the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).
But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.
What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.
Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).
Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.
Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.
The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Youngbloods performing the rock classic, Get Together.
Classic Rock : 1969: various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Scene: Brought to mind by a the cover art on this CD of a Doors/Youngbloods stripped down, just slightly behind the note, waiting to explode, band getting ready to belt out some serious rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night once the "high" wears off, a little.
Everybody had a million stories about Captain Crunch (real name, Steven Stein, Columbia Class of 1958). Ya, Captain Crunch the “owner” of the merry prankster, magical mystery tour, yellow brick road bus that you were “on” or “off” from early 1966 to now, the summer of 1969 now. One story, not the story that I am going to tell you but another story, had it that the Captain had gotten the dough for the bus from his "take" in some ghost of Pancho Villa drug deal down Sonora, Mexico way and that when his friend Ken Kesey, the author, outfitted his Further In, the Captain decided to do the same. He named his bus, the one that I am sitting in right now The Sphinx. Nice name, right, just like the Captain, except he was a guy everybody went to, and I mean everybody including me, when you needed to try to figure something out. Like how to figure the universe and your place in it, or how to open a can of beans. Everything except how to run the Sphinx, which was strictly Ramrod Ricks’ job and nobody messed with him when the Sphinx was involved.
Oh ya, and except when the name Mustang Sally came up (real name Susan Sharpe, Michigan, 1959) the Captain’s "main squeeze" girlfriend. Except when she wanted to be squeezed by someone else. Then the Captain saw red, or some hot color but that is not what I want to talk about because almost every guy, including me, has had a blind spot for some woman since about the time old-time Adam and Eve were playing house.
So this story is not going to be about dames, or about guys getting hung up hard on them since that is not a subject the Captain handled too well. What he did handle well, and nobody questioned that, was helping you figure your place in the non-girl obsessed universe. And his most famous success, although he might not call it that, was with Jimmy Morse, you know, the lead vocalist for the Blood Brotherhood. And although it didn’t have anything to with girls, women I mean, a woman was involved at the start, Mustang Sally, of course.
Sally had a thing for young musicians so once the Captain organized the bus back in ’66 and Sally was the first who came on board she was always, Captain grinding his teeth, on the look-out for such guys. So down in the desert, the high desert just east of Joshua Tree, she “found” Jimmy living among the rocks with some Indians, some renegade tribal warrior band of Hopis, complete with their own shamanic medicine man.
See, Jimmy knew he had the music down, the beat, the rock beat like a million other guys who came of age with Elvis, Jerry Lee and Chuck in that blazing 1950s be-bop rock night. What he was missing, knew he was missing, knew he wanted to be not missing was that cosmic karma thing that separated you out from some so-so- joe be-bopper. Ya, Jimmy had it bad, star-lust bad. So there he was among the rocks. Sally, and I know this because she told me one night when we talking about past lovers and were cutting up old torches in general, went for Jimmy real quickly. But it was also over really quickly she said, like some fade-out burning ember charcoal thing.
But that is where the Captain took over. The Captain, as much as he hated Sally’s hankerings, was a serious musical guy. Music was hanging over the bus all the time. So while Sally wanted their bodies the Captain wanted their muses, or to be their muses if a guy can be such a thing. So when Jimmy came on the bus, and he stayed for about six months, a time before I got on the bus, the Captain kept pushing him to find his inner spirit. And that inner spirit was found, I guess, through many acid trips. But not just that though. See the Captain kept pushing Jimmy toward that shamanic medicine-man-cure-the-wounded-earth-thing that he had started to get into with the Hopis. So when you see Jimmy whirling dervish, trance-like, evoking strange (strange to us) sounds just remember who “taught” him that.
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
Okay, blame this foam-flecked entry totally on old wanna-be “gonzo” journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe and his infernal 1960s classic countercultural expose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’ll explain the ‘wanna-be’ part in some book review, or in some of other place where talking about and discussing the "new journalism (1960s-style, including the likes of Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion)” is called for. But, at least for now, I want to explain the why of that ‘where the blame should be placed’.
And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride “further in” that cemented their zany experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.
Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breath, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….un-hip. And almost no one, hip, un-hip, cloven-footed devil, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as un-hip, un-cool.
The others, those who today claim memory loses on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s, by far, especially those with wayward children of their own. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents.
Today, however, I am excised on another point. Wolfe mentioned, repeatedly, the quasi-religious, mystical nature of the Kesey-gathered Merry Prankster tribal experience. And central to that, as to all such mystical communal experiences, is the emergence of some kind of “messiah” figure, or at least a chief mystic who guides the group’s actions, including the inevitable breakout into the real wide world when that time comes. Then, the breakout time, is when the power struggle really begins as the increased number of acolytes gather round and begin the long process of the selection of the “ins” and “outs”. To speak nothing of the very serious question of who is to “guard” the wisdom tablet (maybe, literally, a tablet in this case). Or who conducts the ceremonials to adhere the devotees. This is well-trodden ground, in any case.
And what in hell am I mad about that little quirky business for? Kesey was hardly the first guy or gal, and will hardly be the last either, to come down off the mountain to spread the “good news,” if only among the elect-at first. Hear me out though. I am sick and tired, utterly sick and tired, after a life time of listening, or really, half-listening to the latest screeds of the “god-seekers”, secular or religious. And of the side show carnival guys claiming for the umpteenth time they have the “new message” about human redemption. And of the about the 287th, or so, rendition of the story line of those who succumbed to some “conversion” religious experience. Enough, right? Well, perhaps, but what I want to blurt out is that, damn, I think Wolfe, and through him, Kesey were basically right that this was a time, the 1960s that is , when we, and I include myself in this as well, were looking for the “new messiah.”
For starters though, just in case the reader is caught up short on the term “new messiah”, forget all the rough and tumble organized traditional religious stuff. That was a non-contender, then anyway. Hell, that was what we were running away from, and running as hard as our wobbly, drug-filled heads would force our legs to take us. (The three of us who have "confessed" to such activity in those days, excuse me. I don’t know in what condition the others were in during their runs.) No, any “church” had to be in some freshly-mown meadow, or among the squirrel-infested pines, or at the edge of the earth on some place where ‘our homeland’ the ocean, the sand and our sense of the vastness of space met. And any “preacher,’ of the “good book” or, for that matter, of the virtues of demonology had to wear multi-colored, flowing home-spun robes, or some discarded army-navy store uniform, or some sheepskin vest, or maybe nothing. But, please, no collars around your neck, or ours. There were plenty of candidates looking for the job, looking to be heard, looking to be listened to and looking for those who were looking, for awhile anyway, until they ran out of steam, ran off with their sweeties, or with the cash box.
What we were looking for, at least what I think we were looking for was someone, once the traditional politicians proved to have feet of clay, or were mired in mud and blood up to their necks, or were blown away, to lead us to the “Promised Land.” That’s right the “Promised Land,” not some old quirky, queasy, hard scrabble, no air place that we all knew, or all of us that were “hip” knew, was not where we were at then. You know sometimes it was as simple as finding someone who had an answer or two. If they had a plan, or maybe had the whole thing mapped out, so much the better. Mainly they just didn’t have to shout about it to the whole square world and bring the squares in to corner it, corral it, organize it, and make it a thing that not even your square, square parents could love.
And that, my friends, is where someone like Ken Kesey got some play, got his edge. His simple Western- bred (American Western-bred) ways, his obvious literary talents that acted as a magnet for those who saw no real difference between mad scientist Kesey and ‘mad scientist’ McMurphy (in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), and his strong branding personality held the Prankster commune together. For a while. Until he too proved to have feet of clay, and fled. But here is the main point in the end it required just too much of a leap of faith to sail into the mystic with the mystics. For those like me, and there were many others like me, we had our mystical moment but when the deal went down we had to look elsewhere to other names to “seek the newer world.” World historic names, names like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, no one, except, maybe, those now professed non-inhalers and vanguard neo-con cultural dead-enders, would confuse with mysticism.
A YouTube film clip of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company performing the bluesy classic, Piece Of My Heart.
Classic Rock : 1968: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
Scene: Brought to mind by a the cover art on this CD of a Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night.
Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some yellow bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, even hanging around with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do. Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, autumns of drugs, winters of discontent, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim runner’s frame could not afford.
Moreover, now the chickens were coming home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though (his temperature rose every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually even now) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.
What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Peter Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.
Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Ruby although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message). Josh, throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. He got surprised one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.
What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace, mad Bessie Smith, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all Piece Of My Heart.
Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting work at the Monterrey Pop Festival each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl, ya just a wisp of a girl, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster. Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. What a night, what a blues singer.
Just now though Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that look in her that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August and still be okay but he had better grab Ruby now while he could.
“Jesus, I never thought I would get here and here I am in San Francisco all in one piece standing at the foot of Russian Hill where all the “hippies” were hanging out before they went over to Golden Gate Park and “blew” their minds,” Joshua Breslin (a.k.a. Prince Love or Prince, and hereafter so identified), late of Olde (very old to hear him tell it) Saco (Maine) High School Class of 1967, but just now of youth nation, youth nation descending on friendly, friend-sized, go West young man (and woman), go West, heaven said to his boon companion of three days, Benny Buzz (real name Lawrence Stein, Brooklyn High School of Science, Class of 1967), also currently of youth nation. It was Benny Buzz who, having the vast experience of having been in ‘Frisco for a week now, and having “been up the hill,” who guided Prince Love to the foot of Russian Hill in preparation for, well, for his first summer of love experience. No, not the eternal teen summer of love at some beach, camp or vacationland amusement park where boys ogle girls (and they back, maybe) but the long expected jail break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan-every-step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles.
Yes, Prince Love, could write the book on hassles, hassles followed by man, or not. Just a few week before he, having just graduated from Olde Saco High, had a “job offer,” a job working as a janitor in Shepard’s Textile Mill, ya, the ones who make those “boss” sweaters the girls are all crazy for these days. Crazy for in winter anyway because right now warm suns, California, Denver, hell even Maine suns, require nothing more than some skimpy top, shoulders showing, and a pair of shorts, short shorts depending on the legs or vanity. His father, Prescott, a long time employee of the mills, the lifeblood of Olde Saco just then, “pulled a few wires” to get him the job for the summer before he went off to State U in the fall. Last year, last year when he was nothing but a raw hang-out in front of the Colonial Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street (officially U.S. Route 1) with his boys (and occasionally girls, but only for a few moments while they picked up their orders) he would have jumped with both feet, maybe with both hands and feet, at the job to get some money for college.
But that was then and this is now, as they say. Now, or rather the now just a few weeks or so before he got to the foot of Russian Hill, he had received word through that mysterious youth nation grapevine that parents, squares, cops, and authority guys were frantic to figure out, but who, in the end, were clueless about, of a “great awakening” that was going on in ‘Frisco and that news fed, fed deep, into the wells of the discontent he was feeling, about his own desire to break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan-every-step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles mentioned before. The grapevine, by the way, was not all that mysterious. Some young, long-haired, wild-looking guy dressed in a blotted multi-colored shirt (later he found out such things were called tie-dyed) from the West Coast had come east to see his grandparents who lived on Olde Saco Beach a few miles down the road and had run into Prince Love at the doughnut shop when he was looking for some joe and cakes to tide him over before a walk on the beach and told him about what was happening on the West Coast. Simple as that, okay.
That information, those pressing on the brain existential jail-break things, and well, he had just broken up with his girl, his long-time high school honey, Julie Cobb, were what drove him to seek the road west. Simple as that. Well not so simple, really, because, if the truth be known, Julie left him for another guy, an older guy who was already working in the mills (not Shepard’s but Cullen’s, the high society linen-makers), had some dough, had a boss 1964 Mustang and, most importantly, wanted to get married, and pretty soon too. That was the sticking point between the Prince and Julia, the marriage game thing that had been going on in the town since, since, well Prince didn’t know but it was pretty common. Graduate Olde Saco, work in the mills, get a couple of bucks, get married, get a tiny house on Atlantic Avenue, maybe, have two point six children, throw in a dog or two cats, and then finish up whitewashing that picket fence in front of the house with the grandchildren. No sale, not for Prince Love. He was going to college, leave the dust of that old town behind, and make a name for himself at something before he settled down in not-Olde Saco, maybe, maybe on the settle down. And from what he heard on his way west, and since he had arrived in San Fran a lot of people were feeling, wondering, groping for some answers just like him. And, ya, looking to try some dope, listen to some far-out music, grab some cool chick to shack up with, and really leave that hometown dust behind before going back east for the fall semester of school.
Now you are filled in, a little, on the what and the why of Prince (and Benny Buzz who however is right then leaving Prince to go see a man, well, go see a man about something, let’s just leave it at that) being on Russian Hill, that classic San Francisco hill mentioned a while back. A hill not previously known to first time ‘Frisco Prince Love, although maybe to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.
I just remembered, you know everything, everything except how Prince Love got here which is not a big deal since he took some dough he had originally saved up for college and used it for the Greyhound bus fare to get him here. Not for him the hitchhike road through every back road. Not for him merry prankster buses driven by mad-monk zen masters in the heated western night.
Why? Well, come on now, not everybody got every piece of news, especially in Podunk Maine, about the ways west, VW bus west, stick-out-the-thumb west and that there were people, your kind of people, ready to pick you up and take you down the road a piece. Even backing up on super-highway interstates to pick up a fellow youth nation straggler left on some desolate stretch fair game for hungry police eyes. Besides, after about a two-day bout with his parents about not taking that summer job, using the dough for college for such foolishness (to quote his everywoman mother), and other assorted arguments, family arguments started back in childhood, he had promised them to take the bus west. Let’s just say hassles, man, hassles and be done with it. And now we are done with past.
Right then though, after saying a few things in parting to Benny Buzz about catching up with each other later, as he started walking up the hill toward the entrance to the mini-“people’s park” that was about half way up Russian Hill Prince spied a tall young man, maybe a few years older than him although such things were always hard to tell with older looking beards, drug haggards, and glazed looks. He was, at second glance, tall but not as tall as Prince, lanky, maybe not as lanky as him either and from the look of him his drug stews diet had taken some additional pounds off, and some desire for pounds as well, not really normally lanky. Dressed, always worthy of description in 1967 “Frisco, male or female, in full “hippie” regalia (faded olive drab World War II army jacket, half-faded blue jeans, bright red bandanna headband to keep his head from exploding, striped checkerboard flannel shirt against the cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds too, and now that we are on the West Coast, with roman sandals on his feet). And to draw the eye more fully to the scene he is sitting with two foxy-looking young women. One, the younger one, maybe a high school student, blonde, blue-eyed, slender, short shorts belying West Coast origin, and de rigueur practical road-worthy peasant blouse. A poster child for San Francisco summer of love if he ever saw one, and of his own feverish Maine night teenage desire summer or winter of love now that Julia was past. The other women, whom he found out later called herself Lupe Matin just then although the Prince found out that she had run through several monikers previously, a college student for sure , dark-haired, dark-eyed, slightly voluptuous, seemingly a little out of place, out of figuring place, with her current male companion completed the entourage. (Her real name, Susan Sharp, Vassar College, Class of 1966, and “trying to find herself.”)
Prince cast several glances at that regal company, nodded slightly, a knowing nod, eyes fixed, as was the fashion just then, and then turned around and asked to no one in particular but kind of zeroing in on the blonde (ya, he had a thing for blondes, see Julia was just that same kind of waspy blonde, minus the tan and year-round sunshine, that he fell for, fell for hard and fast), “Got some dope, for a hungry brother?” The male, who Prince would later come to know as Far-Out Phil (Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville, Massachusetts, Class of 1964), looked at him in a bemused manner (nice touch, right). Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this traveler had either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding himself” bug he could have, thought Far-Out to himself, been Phil’s brother, biological brother.
That line, that single Prince Love line, could have been echoed a thousand, maybe ten thousand times that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed at any small clot of like-minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Red for the head, okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway, relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Joshua Breslin. And, maybe, including the women too.
And, of course, as well was that sense that Far-Out had that he and Prince Love were kindred was based on the way that the Prince posed that first question. His accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but farther north. And once the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting everybody a little talkative then Prince spilled out his story. Yes, he was from Olde Saco, Maine, born and bred, a working-class kid whose family had worked the town mills for a couple of generations, maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some cheaper labor, real cheap. So Joshua, after he graduated from high school a few weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and check out prospects here on the coast for later use after college. Josh, now fully into his Prince Love self finished up his story by saying, “And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope and sitting with some sweet ladies.”
The Prince was just being a little off-handedly flirtatious as was his style when around women, young or old (old being thirty, tops), aiming his ammunition in general but definitely honing in on the blonde, the blonde now identified for all eternity as Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School, California, Class of 1968). (Phil, by the way, never ever said what his reaction to that last part of the Prince’s spiel, the flirtatious part, which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in the re-telling, filled with menace. Girl-taking menace. Well, old North Adamsville corner boy Phil would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer of love it just passed by like so much air.) Naturally Phil, a lordly road warrior now, "on the bus" now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited the Prince to stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Prince Love was “family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.
And of course, family, meant home, and home for Far-Out, Butterfly Swirl, and Lupe Matin meant the now locally famous (West Coast local, okay) yellow brick road bus now known as Captain Crunch’s Crash Pad (after the owner of the bus, and “leader,” whatever that meant, of the expedition). Prince Love, from the first night, not only felt that he had found a home, a home that he never felt he had in Olde Saco but that whatever happened out here he would survive. And as more dope-filled pipes were passed that night, and as the music played louder into the sea-mist bay night, and lights gleamed from all directions the Prince grew stronger in that conviction. Especially when Far Out Phil, acting out of some old testament patriarchal script, came sauntering over to the Prince around midnight and whispered in his ear, “Butterfly Swirl wants to be with you, okay?” And that night the Prince and Butterfly Swirl were “married.”
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Byrds performing their classic wa-wa song So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star to give a flavor of the times to this piece
CD Review
1967: Blowin’ Your Mind, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1990
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Byrds Filimore West-driven classic wa-wa song, So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star .
Phil Larkin, now road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty (and, occasionally, secret delight, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan, damn him, for one of some girl classmates), to full-fledged merry prankster now sits on a 1967 be-bop night San Francisco hill with his new flame Butterfly Swirl, and his old flame, Luscious Lois, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead center. (Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing epidemic as not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Yes, remind me.) A nameless hill, nameless to first time ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland the sea out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.
But enough of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams. Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil, Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case you forgot, or we not paying attention) are a “family,” or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry pranksters (small case, so as not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay) who just yesterday hit ‘Frisco and have planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs of Golden Gate Park after many months on the road west, and some time down south in La Jolla. After hearing the siren call they have now advanced north to feast on the self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will not use the oink word) from the Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story) just about a year ago.
Or has he? Well, sure Phil’s hair is quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more manly, his tattered Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his weight is way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and fearful barely eaten four in the morning open hearth stews, and not much else. And as he sits on that nameless hill with his “ladies” he no longer has the expectation of just trying LSD for the hell of it, having licked it (off a blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times down in La Jolla, watching the surf (and surfers) splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964 except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.
Just that nameless hill minute though, and to be honest, while in the midst of another acid trip (LSD, for the squares just in case you forgot), Phil sensed that something had crested in the Pacific night and that just maybe this scene will not evolve into the “newer world” that everybody, especially Captain Crunch, keeps expecting any day now. Worst, now that he knows he can’t, no way, go back to some department clerk’s job, some picket-fenced white house with dog, two point three children, and a wife what is to happen to him when Butterfly, Lilly Rose, and even Captain Crunch “find” themselves and go back to school, home, academic careers, or whatever. Heavy, man, heavy.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Chiffons performing their classic Sweet Talkin’ Guy
CD Review
Classic Rock: 1966: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1998
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the pieces of artwork that graces each CD in this series. In this case, this 1966 case, the then almost ubiquitous merry prankster-edged converted yellow brick road school bus, complete with assorted vagabond minstrel/ road warrior/ah, hippies, that “ruled” the mid-1960s highway and by-ways in search of the great American freedom night. We never found it in the end, but the search was worth it then, and still worth it now. ***** A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-wept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s come flame or flash-out.
Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma” ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as "the search for the great blue-pink American Western night."
Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo hotpinkorangelemonlime splashes and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded to who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware, nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean.
Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you can find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high-grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically, although just now, as a goof, it has to be a goof, right, one can hear Nancy Sinatra, christ, Frank’s daughter how square is that, churning out These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.
And the driver. No, not mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west). No way, but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one notices those bumps (or else is so stoned, drug or music stoned, that those things pass like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Harverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And just now over that jerry-rigged big boom sound system, again as if to mock the newer world abrewin’ The Vogues’ Five O’ Clock World.
And the passengers. Well, no one is exactly sure, as the bus approaches the outskirts of Denver, because this is strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Nebraska, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music, especially when you are ready to scratch a blackboard over the selections like the one on now, James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet, is not for everyone.
We do know for sure that Casey is driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake have not hit yet, or maybe he really is superman. And, well, that the “leader” here is Captain Crunch since it is “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, (real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of "taking the ride"), Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), his girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice , not his, and he is not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Luscious Lois (and she really is), Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he tells it), Denver Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also have real names that indicate that they are from somewhere that has nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they are also, or almost all are, twenty-somethings that have some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they are all either searching or, like the Captain, at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.
One young man, however, sticks out, well, not sticks out, since he is dressed in de rigeur bell-bottomed blue jeans, olive green World War II surplus army jacket (against the mountain colds, smart boy), Chuck Taylor sneakers, long, flowing hair and beard (well, wisp of a beard) and on his head a rakish tam just to be a little different, “Far Out” Phil (real name Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964). And why Far Out sticks out is not only that he has no college year after his name, for one thing, but more importantly, that he is nothing but a old-time working class neighborhood corner boy from in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor back in North Adamsville, a close-by suburb of Boston.
Of course then Far Out Phil was known, and rightly so as any girl, self-respecting or not, could tell you as “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the world champion swearer of the 1960s North Adamsville (and Adamsville Beach) be-bop night. And right now Far Out, having just ingested a capsule of some illegal substance (not LSD, probably mescaline) is talking to Luscious Lois, talking up a storm without one swear word in use, and she is listening, gleam in her eye listening, as ironically, perhaps, The Chiffons Sweet Talkin’ Guy is beaming forth out of his little battery-powered transistor radio (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know about primitive musical technology) that he has carried with him since junior high school. The winds of change do shift, do shift indeed.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester performing his classic Yankee Lady. Ya, we all had our yankee ladies (or men) then.
From The Jesse Winchester Studio website-http://www.jessewinchester.com/index.html
I'm sorry to announce that I'm canceling my shows for July and August. I have been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, and will have to undergo treatment for the next couple of months. I'm very sorry if any plans have been disrupted; I do hope to see you again soon, and we'll pick up where we left off.
Markin comment:
One of the damn things about growing older is that those iconic figures, in this case one of those iconic music figures, that got us through our youth, continue to pass from the scene. News has just arrived via his website that the singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester is ill. Jesse had a very promising career cut somewhat short by a little thing called the Vietnam War. He felt, as others did at the time, that it was better to be a war resister and go into Canadian political exile, than be part of the American imperial military machine. While I would disagree, in retrospect, with that decision I still personally respect those who made a very hard choice. Harder, much harder, than most kids today have to face, thankfully.
But it was the music that he made, the songs that he wrote, that made many of our days backs then. A song like Glory To The Day set just the right tempo. Better still, Yankee Lady, better because we all had our yankee ladies (or men) back then, or wished for them, whether they came from Vermont or Texas, for that matter. Ya, the “old lady,” rain pouring off some woe-begotten roof, a little booze, a little dope, and a lot of music wafting through the room as we tried to take our places in the sun. Tried to make sense out of a world that we did not create, and did not like. Be well, Brother Winchester, be well.
******** Yankee Lady
I lived with the decent folks
In the hills of old Vermont
Where what you do all day
Depends on what you want
And I took up with a woman there
Though I was still a kid
And I smile like the sun
To think of the loving that we did
She rose each morning and went to work
And she kept me with her pay
I was making love all night
And playing guitar all day
And I got apple cider and homemade bread
To make a man say grace
And clean linens on my bed
And a warm feet fire place
Yankee lady so good to me,
Yankee lady just a memory
Yankee lady so good to me,
Your memory that's enough for me
An autumn walk on a country road
And a million flaming trees
I was feeling uneasy
Cause there was winter in the breeze
And she said, "Oh Jesse, look over there,
The birds are southward bound
Oh Jesse, I'm so afraid
To lose the love that we've found."
Yankee lady so good to me,
Yankee lady just a memory
Yankee lady so good to me,
Your memory that's enough for me
I don't know what called to me
But I know that I had to go
I left that Vermont town
With a lift to Mexico
And now when I see myself
As a stranger by my birth
The Yankee lady's memory
Reminds me of my worth
Yankee lady so good to me,
Yankee lady just a memory
Yankee lady so good to me,
Your memory that's enough for me
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outa here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on ?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke ?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Dont send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
********
This is the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe her, made me said this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a cord in her so we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many customer people were walking by this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night. And that is the way it started, I swear.
Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason, it wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those last year days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years back, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as is the fashion these days is not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.
No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Now, right this 1967 minute, you cannot go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, christ, plastic rose, singular rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while cheapskate embarrassing you when you sheepishly bluster out "no thanks." Or directing you, no steering you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who will, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune. But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory or should be, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.
And, let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working my charm on said girl) with no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition. But see in 1966 (or 1967 as I am writing this) all hell has broken loose in the land. There has been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who have decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father is not in the cards. And one does not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards read or not, to know that death street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. And then see what happens.
But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still need dough, dough to keep off the hairy, not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers (not suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend look at the hippies night roses, and certainly no plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair, and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common). And, like I said, obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. Because, after all that was a summer of love, not this year’s “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this shore to San Francisco and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired former alabaster white-skinned fairy princess is also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.
So, naturally, once I knew the score, that talking several minutes that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap coffeehouse that also served light meals, light meals in the dark so I hoped. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night, a not drunk chef must have been on duty, and then left satisfied. And headed for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.
Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. And I have been in such places before that, no problem, I am, if anything, no snob when it comes to living quarters . What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had made over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day.
So that night, that moonless Commonwealth Avenue garret summer night, Gypsy Love and I got “high,” 1966 (or 1967) high, not old-time alcohol-induced twenty college generations before Saturday night fraternity row beer-kegged, not old-time alcohol-induced whiskey, whiskey with a beer chaser like my father and his working class cronies over at some local Dublin Pub, not rye whiskey with a water chaser like I used to like to drink and still do when there is no sweet weed, sweet tea as I like to nickname call it, not scotch neat, martini dry, manhattan on the rocks Mayfair swells high like the squares out there with the picket fences not oblivion, forget, remember to forget, raging against the day, against the night high, but mellow, insightful high. And this stuff was so strong, so laced with whatever chemist’s knowledge-laced, and with whatever nutrient rich volcanic ash grown side of some desolate latin mountain that we really couldn’t sleep. Maybe Gypsy Love couldn’t sleep because, like I noticed when I first started talking to her, she was so thin and the good non-drunken chef food earlier and then this laced-primo dope kept her up, and I because she was Gypsy Love and I was too busy drinking her in for the first time to waste time on sleep.
So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with it menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene, really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.
But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.
Sure, the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, claribel clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.
Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.
And sure a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years back that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboy, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.
And guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although now I hear about it more, maybe a girl-boy combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, serious intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right here on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets
But also every hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some badass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that last summer, for good or evil. But right then for good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. And then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures start to take distinctive shape, Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while too but that when the colds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling we would have had our moment.
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated July 10, 2011 concerning the passing of legendary sports/life journalist George Kimball.
Markin comment:
There was a time that I would read everything that journalist George Kimball wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Not because I agreed with their political perspectives, or their cultural critiques but because, as Kevin Cullen, points out they represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. And of course, as well, for their love of language, language that curled around an idea. Yes, those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so.
Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.
Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.
Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.
“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van. And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepard turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.
Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.
Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penquins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.
But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.
Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they are all in one circle, even Benjy is in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz starts out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
