***Will The Real Philip Marlowe Stand Up

I will tell you true I like my detectives tough, tough as nails but also ready to chase a windmill or two like some latter day Don Quixote if need be. Need be being determined by some frill (woman, okay I am trying to roughen up my language here to fit the theme) and her wanting habits, her outrageous wanting habits usually. I am talking about private detectives, guys who get paid by the hour or day (plus expenses) and don’t mind taking a few hits on the chin, getting sapped by an errant blackjack, or a non-life threatening slug in the shoulder for the good of the cause (or in pursuit of some frail’s fancy, that damn wanting habit thing). And I am not talking, let’s get this straight right about some clown, some gumshoe peeping through hotel/motel keyholes looking for evidence of love in all the wrong places or trying to find some errant husband who fed up blows town for a while and the wife is looking for her meal ticket, or low-life on the food chain repossessing some skipjack’s car. That is the stuff of everyday life, boring stuff that is not worth the time it takes to write about it. And of course I am not talking about those overblown salaried public detectives who spent more time cadging coffee and crullers, making bookie bets, or shaking down some poor Mom and Pop variety store owner for protection than doing the public good, keeping the bad guys at bay. If they could tell the difference and in my old neighborhood wasn’t easy when in many families one brother was a copper and the other was a corner boy, a wise guy, a guy you better watch out for, and the copper would Dixie any problems for said brother. Nobody said life was on the level, not down in the quicksand base of society.

Yeah, I like my private detectives tough, tough like that guy Philip Marlowe you keep reading about every time you turn around, a guy who had his own rough-hewn code of honor and there was no mistaking that if you got on the wrong side of him, copper or crook, you better watch your back because trouble, trouble with a big T was coming your way. Sure, sure I know before you start thinking that I forgot to take my medication, or I have gone off the deep-end, or something like that a guy, a British guy, a guy who spent most of his life writing insurance policies brought Marlowe to life, brought him to life in seven novels and a few short stories too but Marlowe’s my guy, my kind of private eye.          

Yeah, like the time Marlowe took down the big-time Bay City mobster king of the casinos, liquor and whores (sex workers, remember I am just trying to toughen up my language), Eddie Mars, took him and his baggy brown suit hit man, Mr. C, down hard, no mercy, just because he liked an old guy ,a rich old guy, a general who must have been a general in the Civil War to hear Marlowe tell how he went up the big house in Santa Rosa out in the slumming streets of California to meet the old cuss and he looked that ancient. But liked him (and his liquor and cigars), didn’t like the idea of Eddie Mars turning the general’s wild-eyed, dope-filled younger daughter into a whore turning tricks for the casino clientele to pay off her gambling losses, or that is the story the equally wild-eyed (in his day) general told Marlowe. Didn’t like either the older daughter, a femme if there ever was one, long and leggy too, long and leggy and had Marlowe smacking his lips, paying sweet boy Eddie hush money so the general would not find out his youngest was whoring around town. (To no avail since the general had no illusions about his daughters including the older one who had a dope problem to go along with the hush money and long legs. Furthermore had his own intelligence about what was going on in the world, his world anyway. How do you think he got that hilltop ocean view place in Santa Rosa in the first place). 

Yeah, Marlowe didn’t like Mars and his rough brown suit boy with the snarl who for kicks smacked a little guy, a straight up little guy, trying to earn a living, trying to take care of his girl, dead when he clammed up and Eddie didn’t like guys who clammed up when he wanted answers. Marlowe put that one front and center when he had his set up working. Mr. C. bought his out in the valley with a couple right between the eyes, just like a .38 ought to. They found Eddie nailed to a door after a hail of bullets found their way to him when Marlowe played “chicken” with him. Justice, rough-hewn justice, but justice in this wicked old world. Damn though I never did find out whether Marlowe made that older leggy daughter or he was just left to hang and dry after that family used him up, used him up like dishcloth.                 

Or what about that time he went to bat for a guy, a writer, a writer who had writer’s block but worse, the DTs, had to dry out or get pickled. The writer, a big burly guy who reminded me of Sterling Hayden the old good-looking tough guy weight-thrower from the 1950s B-films, had women problems. Or rather a woman problem, his wife, his young wife so he should have expected trouble, running around with a gambler, a gambler who owed everybody in town, meaning every bookie, and who had him tied up in knots. Marlowe like that writer too, wanted to see him get out from under, see him get out from under even though that gambler was an old drinking buddy of his when he worked Hollywood almost exclusively. But as happens more than you think that buddy got waylaid by that wayward writer’s wife and turned mean on Marlowe, tried to do an end-around, tried to get out from under that pile of debts on Marlowe’s dime. No a good idea brother, not a good bet (no wonder he was desperately in hock) and you might have read, read a while back now where one well-known Los Angeles sportsman was found face down in Sonora in Mexico with two .38s in him. Marlowe always carried a .38.   

So no question Marlowe was a rough and ready guy, no holds barred, but also no holes in his code of honor, at least in his younger days. But like a lot of guys, a lot of guys who take on other people’s troubles for cheap dough (and expenses) our boy, although still tough, got tired, no, maybe got weary and wary is better and so some corners got cut by him over time. 

[Reality check-one: Although there is a fairly straight line that joins the seven Philip Marlowe crime novels written by Raymond Chandler over a span of about twenty years from his grisly windmill-chaser youth to his tired out world weary and wary private detective in the 1950s that is not true of the various Marlowes in the film adaptations of Chandler’s works. Of course when one thinks of the classic Philip Marlowe then the name of the tough as nails, no nonsense, grabbing rough justice wherever he can no matter the price Humphrey Bogart in the film The Big Sleep automatically comes to mind. Like I said old Eddie Mars paid the price for not knowing that bit of wisdom. Other have been suave like Robert Young in the 1940s The Lady in the Lake, gritty like James Garner in 1960s Little Sister and Eliot Gould as ultra-cool and cynical in the 1970s The Long Goodbye. So there are many Marlowes to choose from.]

The one that takes the cake though, the case, the one when Marlowe was still kind of young but wasn’t chasing as many windmills so much as trying like hell to find some dame with some dough to help him get out from under, keep the damn bill-collectors away and stop chasing other people’s dreams. Let him walk on easy street like that lucky stiff Nick Charles, another private dick whose bacon he saved many times up in Frisco town when Nick would jammed up on a case, maybe a missing person’s case that had him scratching his head but which was a walk in the park for Marlowe, who latched on to some lumber king’s daughter from Portland (Oregon, okay) because he helped her out of a jam one time, some stolen jewelry she wanted recovered without dear old dad knowing, and she though he was cute. Jesus. 

[Reality check-two: Sometimes Hollywood, and Marlowe did plenty of work there keeping tramp starlets, wayward mistresses, errant sons and daughters, hysterical wives, blackmailers, drifters, grifters and midnight shifters under wraps, under wraps tight and out of the glare of headlines which is all the studio bosses cared about especially when some high-budget picture was ready to go public, got Raymond Chandler, hell, got one Philip Marlowe all balled up with a too complex story line or changing stuff so it would be cute to the teenage girls who populated the theaters during the war (World War II, for those asking). Take the film, Murder, My Sweet, that beauty was based a little loosely, maybe too loosely on the dialogue and plot, on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely with old song and dance man Dick Powell playing the role of Marlowe somewhere between the pretty boy next door and the stand- up guy ready to take the fall for the client, if only the client, or clients, would level with him just once.] 

Yeah so a little washed out Marlowe was looking for easy street and thought he had, thought that Velma was his ticket home. Thought that Mrs. Marlowe had not raised any fool. Well some things go awry in this wicked old world even for tough guy private dicks. See this Velma was private property to some old Mayfair swell by the time he got to her. The swell (no names, okay because a studio boss told Marlowe to keep a lid on the thing after everything exploded) liked pretty young women and Velma was that and, well, having been a dime a dance girl, or worse, it wasn’t always clear when she told her story or who she told it to was nothing but a gold-digger. Still the swell didn’t get flustered as long as she stayed his trophy wife. Problem was that Velma was spoiled goods, had a big lug, a big mountain of a man Moose, Moose Malone, looking for her after she hadn’t written in six years. Yeah, Moose had bad, had that prison white pallor that Marlowe recognized every time a guy came around who had done a serious stretch in stir. So Moose hired Marlowe to find his Velma.       

There was not enough money in hell for what Marlowe went through for his client once he latched onto the idea he was a right gee. Somebody was trying hard to keep the lid on Velma, her past, and her whereabouts and so before it was over Marlowe got kicked around, got beaten a few times with a blackjack, got drugged, got dragged, got trampled, maybe even got stapled before he got to Velma. So he was in just the right mood to listen to her proposition, to listen to the easy streets singing in his head. Scratch one Moose Malone, scratch one Mayfair swell, maybe scratch a few other guys who knew too much about her, about her past and she was all his. Yeah, Velma was a piece of work.  She, as usual for what Marlowe figures out later, sealed that deal with a little tussle under the silk sheets and Marlowe bought in, bought in like some puppy dog. But see Velma wasn’t on the level. She was the finger who turned Moose in for that eight year stretch, she is the one who so enraged that Mayfair swell that he was ready to go up against the Moose one on one, she was the one who wanted all the swell’s dough for herself and left Marlowe to take the fall, take the big step off up at Q. And he would have too if Moose hadn’t done her in. Jesus all for coffee and cruller money (and expenses). Double Jesus.      

[Reality check-four: But see that is where all Marlowes are equal-they don’t give up the ghost until there is a little rough justice in this wicked old world. Even if as here the bullets fly fast and furious at the end with no obvious winners.]       

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall

 

…who knows when he first began to notice the difference, notice that the music, his parents’ music, the stuff, as they constantly told him, that got them through the “Depression and the war,” grated on his ears. Of course they, his parents specifically, no question, and their kindred later designated the “greatest generation” by pundits and accepted wisdom as they died off although this sketch is about his generation so we will let that issue pass gained that distinction for having suffered the pangs of hunger, displacement, the struggle for survival, the train smoke and broken dreams heading west (hell maybe in any direction that was not where they lonesome, separate, at luck’s end were) looking for work, looking for a new start in the 1930s. Then gathering themselves up when the war clouds turned into live ammunition lined up to fight whatever evil had reared its head in this wicked old world in the 1940s, or waited at home fretfully reading the casualty lists as they were posted in home towns across America.

Of course like every generation since they invented that term “generation” and put some special onus on each one going back to Adam and Eve, maybe before, they had their own tribal music to get them through the tough spots, to dance to or just to find some secluded spot and listen to. And that would have been fine with him that secluded spot idea (although at the first grating on the ears time he was too young to be aware of what that secluded spot stuff portended but he picked the idea up easily later when he came of age) except he had to face that big old family RCA console radio plucked right down in the living room every day blaring away while his mother did her housework, his father listened after work, and  they got all dreamy together over WJDA every Saturday night when for five hours, five hours count them, the station endlessly played “the songs that got them through the Depression and the war.”  Jesus.             

Still although it was a daily plague on his ears he was not sure when he noticed that he had had enough of silky-voiced Nat King Cole all smooth and mellow and ready to put him to sleep (or worse), the Inkpots spouting off  and gumming things up by talking the lyrics for half the song on If I Didn’t Care or his mother’s favorite I’ll Get By (the song she said that got her through the war what with her working as a clerk down at the Naval Depot in Hullsville at the time his father was Marine island-hopping in the Pacific and while she fretted over those casualty list postings in front of the Daily Gazette office), Bing Crosby (not the 1930s Bing of Yip Harburg’s Brother, Can You Spare A Dime but the later pretty-boy mellow White Christmas stuff) and the like. He had moreover become tired unto death of the cutesy Andrews Sisters and their antic bugle boy, rum and coca-cola, under the apple tree music, tired of Frank (later called the “chairman of the boards” but still way too placid for him although he remembered his mother showing him a photograph of perfectly sane looking girls in bobby-sox swooning all over the place to get next to him at some theater in New York City ), Frankie (Lane okay) and Dean (before Jerry), tired of Tony fly me to the moon, Benny and his very tired clarinet Buddha swing, the whole Harry James/Jimmy Dorsey/Tommy Dorsey/Duke/Count/Earl/King and whatever other royalty they could latch onto big band sound and even blessed Charley/Dizzy/Miles be-bop, be-bop jazz (stuff that he would later, way later, crave when he went “beat” joined, joined late that big beat fellahin world Jack Kerouac was always going on and on about). Yes, yeah, tired unto death craving some sound that moved him, some sound that he could sway his rigid locked-up boyish man hips to. A break-out for sure.

Maybe it was because he was showing serious signs of growing pains, of just being a pain like his parents had taken to call him more and more often lately, and just wanted to be by himself up in his room (as the oldest boy he got the single room once the family moved to the new three bedroom house from that cramped apartment over on Elmer Street where all three boys ah dot sleep in one room and there were more fights over that fact mercifully done now) and let the world pass by until his growing pains passed by. It started one day in 1956 as far as he could remember the first time that he asked his parents to turn off the radio, or turn off WJDA, or turn on this new station that one of the kids at school was talking about coming out of Boston, WMEX the call letters he thought. This kid, Richie, a good kid who knew a lot about music swore that one of the commercials on the show was about Max’s Drive-In over on the other side of North Adamsville and a place where his parents had taken him and his brothers for burgers and fries which if you could believe this was the new “hot” spot because Max had installed speakers in each stall so that every hip guy and swaying gal could listen to WMEX while munching on a burger or swallowing a French fry. Listen to stuff that was Frank-Benny-Duke-Bing-less. Something was in the wind.     

Something may have been in the wind but he was still filled with all kinds of teen angst and alienation (no, he did not use those terms to describe his condition and only learned the terms much later after much turmoil, a few beefs with the parents, and after reading a Time magazine article about kids today going to hell in hand basket what with hanging around corners in white tee-shirts and snarls, doing crazy stuff to pass the time of day and listening although he was foggy on the music they described but it sounded interesting which is why he picked up the article from his father’s chair in the first place). Mainly though what was on his mind had been about his growing so fast, fast and awkward, too fast and awkward to figure out what this new found interest in girls was all about. Last year, last year before his parents’ music grated on his ears, they were nothing but giggly girls and a bother but now he could see, well, he could see that they might be interesting to talk to if he could find something to say. Could maybe ease his way in with some music talk like that good guy Richie did. All he knew was that life was tough and made tougher by his parents always saying no, no in principle like there was no other possible answer.    

But here is the funny part his parents, like he found out later when he figured out how parents worked, parents always do and had worked it out as a science, switch up on kids. See one day to placate him (or, heaven forbid, to keep him out of sight and therefore out of mind) they, his usually clueless parents, had gone to the local Radio Shack store and bought him a transistor radio to be able listen to music up in his room rather than lie around the living room all night after his parents had gone to bed changing the dials, their dial settings, looking for some other stations, looking for WMEX to see if Richie was right about Max’s Drive-In, on that damn old family RCA radio which had formed the center piece of the room before the television had displaced it. This transistor radio was a new gizmo, small and battery-powered, which allowed the average teenager to put the thing up to his or her ear and listen to whatever he or she wanted to listen to away from prying eyes. Hail, hail.

And that little technological feat saved his life, or at least help save it. The saving part was his finding out of the blue on one late Saturday night Buster Brim’s Blues Bonanza out of WRKO in Chicago. Apparently, although he was ignorant of the scientific aspects of the procedure, the late night air combined with the closing down of certain dawn to dusk radio stations left the airwaves clear at times to let him receive that long distance infusion. Buster was a mad man monk talking in a drawl like maybe he was from down south, talking jive, talking a line of patter with sing-song words, words that he would later recognize as from the be-bop vocabulary pushed into the orbit of this rock and roll thing some DJ invented (DJs the guys who spun the platters-played the records for the squares who don’t know) for the new sound that was putting a big crimp in vanilla popular music. He immediately sensed that the music emanating from that show had a totally different beat from his parents’ music, a beat he would later find came out of some old-time primordial place when we all were born, out of some Africa cradle of civilization. Then though all he knew was that the beat spoke to his angst, spoke to his alienation from about twelve different things, spoke to that growing pains thing. Made him, well, happy, when he snapped his fingers to some such beat. What he was unsure of, and what he also did not found out about until later, was whether this would last or was just a passing fancy like those Andrews Sisters his parents were always yakking about.

What he didn’t know really was that though that little gizmo he had been present at the birth of rock and roll. Was right at the place where that be-bopping sound was turning into a sway by white guys from the farms down in Tennessee, getting refined by some black guys from the Delta, being turned out by some urban hep-cats from New Jack City and anybody else who could get his hips moving to the new time beat. Geez, and all he thought he was doing was snapping his fingers until they were sore to Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall…                 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (The War To End All Wars Remember) Approaches ... Some Remembrances

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas In The Trenches

Song credits: 

words and music by John McCutcheon

Inspired by a back-stage conversation with an old woman in Birmingham, AL, this song tells a story that is not only true, but well-known throughout Europe. For some of the history behind the 1914 WWI Christmas Truce, click here.

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool,
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was "Stille Nacht," "Tis 'Silent Night'," says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone coming towards us!" the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
As he bravely strode unarmed into the night.
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.

©1984 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP)

***In The Time Before The Rock ‘n’ Roll Jailbreak –They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They

 

Some people ask, although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. Usually such people are young, or were before what is now called the classic age of rock and roll became the classic age and so now they, the young, ask was there music before hip-hop nation beat down the doors, or if any other genre strikes their interest like techno-rock that might form the basis for their question. But rock, rock as I know it, I, Frank Jackman, who lived for the latest 45 RPM record to hit the stores along with my corner boys was the basis for the question back then. Back in the 1950s when the world was young and America, young America, still had that capacity to wonder before the lamp went out, wonder just like Scott Fitzgerald pointed out about those who found places like New York City, the Mecca for a lot of things, including the production of those 45 RPM records I mentioned, people like those Dutch sailors with the Van names must have felt when they saw that “fresh green breast of the new world.” And rightly so since what we heard before, heard to perdition was some vanilla stuff that our parents liked but I will get to that later. In other words time, new millennium time, has left classic rock for the aficionados or for, well, old fogies, you know the AARP-worthy denizens whose demographics form the basis for rock musical compilations and “oldies but goodies” revivals with now ancient heartthrobs from back in the day who have lost a step or three coming out on some massive stage and lip-synch, yes, lip-synch their greatest hits (or hit in the case of those important musical one-hit johnnie and janies). But there, believe it or not, but take my word from me like old Rabbit Brown used to say his song James Alley Blues, were other types of music, music that helped formed rock and roll that I found out about later after I had my fill of 45 RPM records and corner boys and wanted to dig into the history of the American songbook, see what drove earlier generations of the young to seek their own jailbreak out.      

So of course there was music before rock, I had better say classic rock so nobody gets confused and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues around the turn of the century, the 20^th century, when all those freed slaves who thought they were economically free and not just manacle-free wound up working for Mister in his twenty-eight thousand acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi for a pittance. Kept in line, and here is where the bitch of the thing is by a guy, well, not really a guy but a way of life named after a guy maybe, one Mister James Crow, and so those freed blacks who slaved on Mister’s land had to blow off steam and that was the basic of the blues, and I don’t mean blues like when a guy has a good girl who done him wrong on his mind. Hell that problem was easy to solve. I mean when Mister, or his Captain, pushed the pace all week (half a day Saturday included) and every worthy buck and every good-looking gal, big thighed or not, hit Jimmie Jack’s juke joint to listen to some itinerant brother with a broken down guitar wail away about that damn Captain, his, the singer’s, unfaithful women and about how “the devil’s gonna get him” for nickels and dimes in the pot (and some of Jimmie Jack homemade) and got the crowd swaying and clapping their hands to the beat on See See Rider or Mississippi Highwater Rising. Yeah, that’s the start. Okay.

Too far back for you? Okay let’s travel up the river, the Big Muddy, maybe stop off at Memphis for a drink, and to nurse the act, before hitting the bitch city, Chicago, hog butcher, steel-maker and every other kind of tool and appliance-maker to the new industrial world just ask Carl Sandburg. But also maker by proxy of the urban blues, those old hokey plantation Son House/Charley Patton/ Blind Blake (and a million other guys with Blind in front of their names) juke joint Saturday night full of homemade blues turned electric with the city and turned guys like plain boy Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (you would laugh at their real names although you would not do that in their presence, especially the Wolf because he would cut you bad, real bad) into the kings of  Maxwell Street and all the streets around with back-up and all putting just the right twist on Look Yonder Wall, Rocket 88, Hoochie Goochie Man and Little Red Rooster (with kudos to Willie Dixon too). So, yeah, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities

Jazz too maybe a little Duke and Benny swing as it got be-bopped and for the beat, for the drum action, for the “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing” that took over after a while. But Dizzy, Charlie Thelonius too with that cool, detachment mood that spoke to the beat down, the beaten down, the big blast beaten fellahin world. Certainly throw in rhythm and blues, north and south, throw in big time one Mister Big Joe Turner toot-tooting his sweet mama to Shake, Rattle and Roll that had all those alienated, angst-ridden white guys (whether they knew it or not ) lined up to cover the damn thing. Yeah guys like Elvis (when he was hunger), Bill Haley when he needed to kick his act up a notch, and Jerry Lee when he needed to put fire into that piano.

Then came alone a strange mix and match, rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South, Tupelo, Biloxi, Lake Charles, Lafayette, Jesus, the smaller the town it seemed the more the guys wanted to breakout, wanted to push the envelope of the music, wanted to get away from that “from hunger” look, wanted that big bad Caddy they saw in the magazines. Came out with those same boys lining up to sing Joe Turner, hungry Elvis, Carl, Johnny, Jerry Lee, to sing black along with that good old boy Saturday night moonshine tucked in the back seat of that bad ass Chevy looking, looking for danger, and looking for women to sing to who were looking for danger. Country boys, yeah, but not hokey George Jones country boys these guys wanted to breakout of  Smiley’s Tavern over on Highway One, wanted girls to dance on the tables, wanted guys to get up and dance with those Rubys and red-headed girls. Yeah, they mixed it and matched like big time walking daddies (and I hear had fun doing it, hell, it beat eking out a living clerking at Mister Smith’ feed store.  

What rock and roll owed little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to, is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. You know Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Over The Rainbow stuff. That part of the songbook seems to me to be a different trend away from that jailbreak song that drove us wild and one that was reflected in a CD compilation review I did one time (for the young, maybe the very young, CDs were discs loaded with a bunch of songs, some you liked, maybe three, and the  rest you had to buy as well because you desperately wanted those three not like today when you just hopped on some site to grab something and download it, presto), The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which really was about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Yeah, not exactly stuff your parents liked but stuff that maybe was good if you a “hot” date that did not turn out well and you listened to it endlessly on your defeated way home. Yeah, let’s be clear about that, that stuff your older brother and sisters already halfway to that place where your parents lived swooned over, not you.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, and listened to swing, jitter-buggery things and swooned (they really did check YouTube if you want to take my word from me) over big bands, brass and wind swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that got us moving to break out and seek a newer world, to try to scratch out an existence in a world that we had not say in creating and dream, dream do you hear me, about turning the world upside down and keeping it that way for once. I remember writing in that review that the music in that compilation drove me up a wall and I was ready to shoot my CD player, the instrument that I heard it on, once I heard it (younger reader just put shoot your iPOD and we will be on the same page.

No, this was the music that reflected, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word exists) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, they found out that you could let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. Mostly. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened to them then like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On this compilation Harbor Lights is done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, when he was young and hungry while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. NO young women would get all wet, would get all sweaty and ready to try their underwear at the drop of a hat for Sammy’s version. Case closed. And the compilation only got worse from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said.

*******

Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights

They only told me we were parting

Those same old harbor lights

That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights

How could I help it?

Tears were starting.

Good-bye to golden nights

Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,

And kiss you just once more.

But you were on the ship,

And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights

For all the while my heart keeps praying

That someday harbor lights

Will bring you back to me.

***On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Release Of The Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Some songs in any generation act as markers for that generation. For the generation of ’68, my generation (and Bill Clinton’s but I will make that connection more fully in a minute), one of those songs was the Dixie Cups’ Chapel of Love which was released fifty years ago this week. Of course that was a time in our generation when the world was young and we were full of wonder, enough wonder to echo Scott Fitzgerald’s words about what those long ago old Dutch sailors must have felt when they eyed Long Island and caught a glimpse of that “fresh green breast of the new world” and all its possibilities. A time before the flame burned out in America and we could no longer claim the rights of innocence.  And we were innocent then about lots of things, including the subject of the song, marriage to that special one that had caught your eye and whom you could not live without unless you were hitched. A lot of us, including this, writer were caught up in the trail leading to marriage, leading to the eternity of togetherness almost automatically without thinking. Like a lot of things though not every search for the newer world ended happily. But don’t blame the Dixie Cups for that. Okay.

 

Of course Chapel of Love was one of those iconic songs that even fifty years later one can remember and sing (well at least lip-synch) without a problem, or without embarrassment. Even Bill Clinton. On an interview show today on public radio the guests today included the Dixie Cups reminiscing about the song, how it was produced, the trials and tribulations of the music road as result of their success, and the lasting fame they have received from that one big, big hit. One of the singers, I forget which one, mentioned that at a concert in New York City they were introduced to Bill Clinton who knew exactly who they were and moreover broke out into the song at the mere mention of their names. Pretty good. Guess what, if anybody asked me I too could break out and sing the song without missing a beat. Thanks, sisters.              

 For those who don't remember though here you are:

 

Chapel of Love  

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

Spring is here, the sky is blue, whoa oh oh
Birds all sing as if they knew
Today's the day we'll say, "I do"
 And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

 

Bells will ring, the sun will shine, whoa oh oh
I'll be his and he'll be mine
We'll love until the end of time
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love

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Songwriters

SPECTOR, PHIL/BARRY, JEFF/GREENWICH, ELLIE

 

 

‘Chapel Of Love’ Song Turns 50

 

Members of the singing group The Dixie Cups, from left, Rosa Hawkins, Barbara Hawkins and Athelgra Gabriel, pose for a photo during the reception for the 13th Annual Pioneer Awards presented by the Rhythm & Blues Foundation Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003 in New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Fifty years ago, three young women from New Orleans hit it big with the release of their single “Chapel of Love.” The Dixie Cups song was an instant chart-topping hit on the pop and R&B charts, displacing the reigning champs of the Billboards, The Beatles, and reclaiming the charts for American musicians in the midst of the British Invasion.
Since 1964, the song has become a part of American culture, providing the soundtrack for countless weddings and used in movies like “The Big Easy” and “Father of the Bride,” and on the TV show “Glee.”

It surpassed everybody on the chart, and it knocked the Beatles out of first place.

– Rosa Hawkins

The group was comprised of two sisters, Rosa Hawkins and Barbara Hawkins, along with their cousin Joan Marie Johnson.
Today The Dixie Cups are still performing, but not with the original line-up. The newest Dixie Cup is Athelgra Neville, who the sisters refer to as “our sister from our extended family.”
All three ladies joined Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson to talk about “going to the chapel.” The Hawkins sisters reminisced about the unlikely way they got their big break — a high school talent show, in which the group did not even place.
“There was a talent scout in the audience, and he didn’t know how to get in touch with us,” Barbara said. “We used to babysit for Larry McKinley, who was the disc jockey in New Orleans, and we were at his home, and his wife’s cousin won second place. Her name was Barbara. So she asked me to go with her to the talent scout, and we ended up going to his home. Well, when we walked in, he kept looking at me. So then he said, ‘Are you one of the ladies who was in the green dresses at the talent show,’ and I said yes. So he went and picked up the program and showed me that he had circled our names. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you guys. You guys were wonderful.’ He said, ‘I want to talk to you about recording,’ and we sang for him, and he just went crazy.”

The Dixie Cups pose for a photo with former U.S. President Bill Clinton in September 2005. (Courtesy of the Dixie Cups)

The rest, as they say, was history, and once the group signed to a label, it took next to no time for “Chapel of Love” to climb the charts.
“When it was released, it went zoom,” Barbara said. “Joe [Jones] had told us that, ‘Your chance of making a number-one record is a 150 million to one.”
“The Beatles were out, and they had, at that time, their time was ‘Love Me Do,’” Rosa added. “But ‘Chapel of Love,’ it was released, it surpassed everybody on the chart, and it knocked the Beatles out of first place and kept first place for three weeks.”
To this day, the song remains a classic and is often used in movie soundtracks. According to Neville, the theme is timeless.
“Everybody wants to get married,” she said. “Every woman wants to go to the chapel. So, you know, I think that’s what did it.”

Guests

• Barbara Ann Hawkins, original member of The Dixie Cups.
• Rosa Lee Hawkins, original member of The Dixie Cups.
• Athelgra Neville, newest member of The Dixie Cups.

 

 

 

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (The War To End All Wars Remember) Approaches ... Some Remembrances Of War

 

 

 

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Elvis’s That’s When Your Heartache Begins

 

…Laura Simpson and Fiona Sims were inseparable friends from that first day in ninth grade at North Adamsville High School in 1960 when due to the vagaries of the alphabet and homeroom class row seating rules they sat one in front of the other in Miss William’s home room class.  [This Miss Williams as they would be the first to tell you once they completed four years of her home room craziness was a Miss for a reason, not so much because she was one of the plainest women in America but because she demanded, demanded do you hear, that everybody be absolutely quiet in homeroom, home room for chrissake. It was not until years later when the winds changed in a more confessional age that these young women found out that as a result of her own youthful indiscretion Miss Williams had secretly befriended many girls, some known to them, who had gotten in “trouble,” gotten “in the family way” and she had helped them out. Sometime somebody from North Adamsville should write that story, write it in big letters too.] 

 

So Laura and Fiona sat next to each other and sensed in each other that subtle fear of the unknown that every, or almost every, freshman has felt since, well, since Socrates’ time, maybe before. And so they sought shelter from the storms together (and later with a small coterie of other adrift teen girls who also had that subtle fear but this story is about Fiona and Laura so we will let that latter set of anxiety associations about boys, about expectations in being girls, about getting recognized for serious achievement in a male-dominated world, about sex and what to do about those raging hormones without “getting in the family way,” and being sought after for girl friendship pass).

 

We moreover are concerned not so much with their high school days except to note that is where their huddled friendship started and to note some of the highlights that strengthened their friendship, not always in good ways but who knows maybe in not so bad ways. You know getting through that first few months of freshman year in one piece in an anonymous big high school environment after the incubator closeness of junior high school, preparing for that first school dance, that first high school dance where they got all dressed up, bought new shoes and all, and doubled-dated two older guys from the school, two seniors who were known around school as nothing but skirt-chasers but who had a car and both girls decided to fling caution to the wind if it came to that (it did and they did although keep that to yourself since they both had reputations in freshman year of being “unapproachable,” meaning in the language of the times virginal), latter getting caught up with each other’s single date sexual escapades what with little trysts down at the secluded end of old Adamsville Beach (the Squaw Rock end where only teenagers trended, no nosey cops, no ill-disposed families with children to spoil the mood), then senior year after both got accepted to the state university the few wild parties they attended before graduation where when drunk they got carried away with some unusual behavior, for them, which maybe foretold what might happen in the future. That last set of escapades included an exchange of boyfriends, not those long gone seniors from freshman year but fellow seniors, for the night on a lark (who were more than willing to go along, did not have to be coaxed into doing that task). Both later said nothing had happened with the other’s boyfriend, noting sexual anyway, and maybe nothing did, but a very slight wariness set in, especially on Laura’s part who was somewhat possessive of her men. (Later Ben one of the boyfriends, Laura’s, bragged about how he could hardly keep up with Fiona’s urges  once he got her into bed but that was in the Monday morning jock locker room talkfest and could be discounted as such, and has been since Socrates’ time, maybe before.)     But that was a mere bump in the road for both were excited about finally graduating and heading away from home and on their own (this getting away from home was epidemic among the early 1960s young including the writer so he knows how important learning to fly on their own was to Fiona and Laura). Moreover having both grown up on the wrong side of the tracks (although in different sections of that wrong side) with tough family lives including drunken fathers they were more than ready to move on.       

 

Duly noting those high school experiences, for good or evil, we are rather more concerned with their young adulthood, the time when in 1964 and later they came of age, came to able to carry on their own affairs after leaving home for college, the state university at Amherst with all its possibilities and with all its anonymousness. One thing that both Fiona and Laura had agreed on after graduation from high school was that they would start college unattached. And they did so shedding their boyfriends, their lukewarm boyfriends by August when they went up to freshman orientation and dorm selection (they had already signed up as roommates). (Those boyfriends, Ben and Alex,  by the way who maybe were or maybe were not sorry for the break-ups but one wonders whether they were left unhappy about that future of no prospects of being exchanged on a lark. We will never know since we are following Laura and Fiona and the boys’ whereabouts were unknown when this story unfolded.) When the big day came they were both excited, excited to be on their own, excited that that subtle fear that both felt, felt as every, well almost every, freshman, has felt since, well, since about Socrates’ time, if not before would find them with a known kindred spirit when the hugeness and anonymousness of the place got to them.

         

This tale however is not about surviving in an alien environment with a cluster of friends or some sociological study about the mores of 1960s youth and their reactions to the jailbreak wave that was cresting over them with newfound liberties and freedoms (for a while anyway) that earlier generations could not dream of but rather about how a firm friendship got blown to the four winds when one of the friends got her wanting habits on. As one might figure with young women away from home (or men, for that matter), consciously unattached, and with broods of males everywhere one looked that two good-looking, smart, adventuresome young women would have no trouble finding male company. They didn’t lack for company or invitations to frat parties and other bashes. From that first Freshman Mixer when they again like some high school deja vu double-dated two fellow freshman from one of their classes (College Math) whom they met after class in the dorm cafeteria where the guys worked behind the counter and they “hit” on the two most beautiful girls in any of their classes they said through to a couple of serious affairs, one by Fiona with a married man, until the time of this part of the story junior year.

 

Fiona tended to be flirty and, well, not monogamous. Laura somewhat the opposite, although that usually depended on whether she had a steady boyfriend or not. At the time we are talking about, junior year, Laura did have a steady boyfriend, Lance Taylor, a senior at Williams, located some miles up the road, who planned to go to graduate school, and who had plans, sketchy plans, that involved marriage to Laura at some future point. Laura having met Lance at the Art Museum out in Williamstown while doing a project for her graphic arts design class, assumed that same thing, except hungrier for security, her plans were far from sketchy as she practically had them in that proverbial white house with picket fence, three kids, and two dogs. And so she dreamed. Now this Lance, naturally, as with all guys named Lance or so it seemed was good-looking, smart, came from some money (important to working-class town Laura) and was a go-getter. Just the things that Fiona found appealing as well. So anytime Lance showed up at their dorm room and she was around she would get very flirty with old Lance. Laura had to warn her off a couple of times but Fiona dismissed her concerns as nonsense that she was just having fun with her new “brother-in-law.”

 

Things settled down for a while until toward the end of junior year Laura took a trip to Boston in order to interview for a senior year internship with an advertising company to spice up her graphic arts resume. She had expected (and Fiona had too) to take three days for the trip but the firm after the first interview decided to take her on as an intern and she headed back early. (People who know knew she was an exceptional up-and-coming graphic artist and that proved true later before she gave it up for marriage and kids.)

 

Well, you already know the rest, and if you don’t you really haven’t been paying attention, Laura caught Lance and Fiona in flagrante in their dorm room. You also know that was the end of the long friendship between Fiona Sims and Laura Simpson. What you don’t know is this-ten years, ten long years later at their high school class reunion, Laura Taylor, Lance in tow (the details of their after dorm reconciliation need not concern us here except that somehow Lance convinced Laura that Fiona had “made” him do it which for her own white picket fence reasons Laura was willing to accept)not even drunk but cold stone sober, tossed a drink, a whiskey sour, down the length of Fiona Sims shiny shimmy dress and then walked out of the hall. Jesus.