The Folk Music Of The Hippie Generation (1962)-With The Music Of Erick Saint-Jean In Mind.

By Zack James

Seth Garth and I, Jack Callahan, his closest friend in high school although we had been something like enemies in junior high over some silly girl named Rosalind whom I thought he had tried to cut my time with but had been wrong about, were as thick as thieves one frosty November Saturday night in 1962 when he conned me into heading over to Harvard Square, the Harvard Square that fronts Harvard University although we were not going to have anything to do with the University, not that night anyway. The conning wasn’t as bad as it sounds because what Seth had proposed was that we take in a show, I guess that is what you would call it although maybe concert or just performance would be better, at the Club Nana where this up and coming guy Erick Saint-Jean was going to sing some of his folk songs-some covers of other folk performers like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and some original work about par for the course in such things.

That Friday morning before Seth had cornered me in the first floor corridor of Riverdale High where we were both sophomores and begged me to take Laura Perkins as my “date” to go and hear Saint-Jean. Jimmy Jenkins, as usual, had chickened out, had no dough, had no balls, not enough to handle Laura, or something but whatever the reason he had cornered Seth in the Boys’ lav before school and gave him the somber news that he would not be able go to the concert. Who gives a rat’s ass what the reason was all I know is that I got cornered by Seth shortly after that. The “hook” that had me conned was that his date, Sally Soren, although everybody called her Sal once Seth started to call her by that nickname, could not go with him to Cambridge or anyplace else for that matter unless there was another couple going along as well. No questions asked. No company, no go and Seth was crazy to go, and crazy for Sal. And as it turned out she was crazy for him as well.

It seems that Sal’s parents were strict Brethren of the Common Life communicants and were having fits that Sal was going anyplace with a “heathen,” their term for anybody not a Brethren, not a Brethren boy although who knows maybe even that crowd was off-limits. The only reason they had consented to let Sal go with this particular “heathen” was that Seth, who really did have a bagful of knowledge about such things as hymns and other religious-type songs as part of his book of knowledge of such ancient music, had conned them into thinking all the trips to Cambridge were to take Sal to a social event where hymns and such were to be sung.   

I said “no” at first because while I liked the idea of being around Laura Perkins although she had always been cool around me especially when she found out that I was the guy who gummed up the works with her taking dead aim at Jack Callahan when he had eyes for Kathy Kelly and I gave Kathy the word folk music made my teeth grind, the whole scene that Seth dug was so much soapy air to me. This had not been the first time that Seth tried to get me over to some folk venue either in Boston or Cambridge. The previous October he had forced my hand, had made a bet with me that I would like folk music as a pleasant change from rock and roll music which was nowhere just then. Said I needed a ‘cure’ from bitching about guy singers like Ricky Nelson, Fabian, Bobby Rydell and bitching about a bunch of girl singers like Sandra Dee and Leslie Gore who had made me almost swear off listening to my transistor radio. He said Doris Nelson who was starting to make a name for herself in the local folk ho-hum was appearing at the Turk’s Head in Boston and I just had to hear her to fall in love with her voice, her ballad-strewn voice. He added that she was a knock-out as well. Which I bought into in the end although how a sophomore in high school like me was going to get near a young woman who had recently graduated from Boston University was left unexplained by him, or thought about by me while he was about the business of conning. 

We had that night, just he and I, no dates or even just hang around girls from school  tagging along taken the subway after having a couple of drinks of Southern Comfort that Willie the Wino down at the river-front park where he hung out (that moniker was how he was known by every under-aged kid in town and how he responded to anybody who was in need of his services) who went to Johnny Glenn’s Liquor Store and bought the suck-ass booze for us because the stuff was cheap and got you high fast and on fire after just a little for us after we gave him enough extra money to get his tusk of Thunderbird as his fee). The one in town near the Greyhound bus station that took you to the nearest subway stop at Field’s Corner which then took you rumble-tumble, bumpy-bump toward Boston or Cambridge depending on where you were heading, what stop you want to get off at. This Turk’s Head was supposed to be the “hip” place where all the new talent, talent like Seth claimed this frail Doris had, that was taking up the folk craze just then got their work-outs, perfected their acts before moving on to bigger venues, really bigger coffeehouses which was where the action was then wherever Seth in his whacko brain thought the music was going.

So we got there after stopping off at the Charles Street subway stop since the Turk’s Head was on Charles Street itself so we didn’t have to walk too far. We were looking for number twenty-two and we couldn’t  find it, asked a guy where it might be, number twenty-two first then when that came up empty we asked by name and the guy pointed  across the street and we still couldn’t see any sign of a coffeehouse or a sign of anything. The guy said that the place, the cool place he added, was down in the basement. Jesus. Even Seth was thrown off by the idea of stepping down in some basement when he had built up this folk thing as the big deal. So we crossed the street, headed down to the cellar and almost bumped our heads on the cross-beam that seemed to be holding the place up and came to a young woman sitting behind a cash register asking us for two dollars each as a cover charge. I told Seth I didn’t have two dollars, had maybe a buck to get home and he fronted me the dough since he said he had caddied  that morning up at Crosswinds Country Club, his main way to get dough since otherwise his family, like mine had no dough.

I should explain about the look of that gal at the cash register because looking around the then half-empty room since we had gotten there kind of early which had maybe a dozen or fifteen tables, two and four chairs to a table and while never totally filled up that evening half the girls, maybe more, in the place looked as for style like the cash register girl. As the place did fill up the look, the sameness of style got even more pronounced, I would come to see that look almost explode on college campuses by the time I got there myself.  She, I think somebody said her name was Mimi something, had long black hair which went straight down her back almost to her ass and which I found out later when I had a girlfriend who looked like her that she had ironed with an iron to keep it straight, wore a colorful peasant blouse of the kind that I had seen in the movies that Mexican peasant women wore, or Jane Russell in Hell’s Angels, except she, Jane, showed a lot more shoulder and a lot more bosom, a tight black skirt which went to her knees like a lot of the girls at school wore and open-toed sandals even though it was November. (Later toward the end of the folk craze that comely peasant blouse showing shoulders and knee-length skirt would be replaced by a formless, from nowhere granny dress to the ground which reminded me of the potato sacks girls wore back in sixth grade.)  At the time I was seriously into beehive hair blondes with tight, very tight cashmere sweaters, those okay tight black skirts and some kind of pumps I think they called them except on gym days when they wore tennis sneakers, at least at school. So that Turk’s Head girl while obviously pretty and a bit foxy every time she looked my way was strictly no heart beat for me-then.  

Seth and I took our seats near the front of the place near this tiny stage just big enough for one performer it seemed and maybe a small instrument like a flute or clarinet since that was where the two seat tables were and because Seth wanted to hear Doris clearly while he was taking notes about her performance, how the audience reacted to her play list and what he called getting “color,” getting a feel for what the folkies as he called them were up to. After we had sat down a few minutes later a waitress came by to take our order. Naturally she looked like she could have been the sister to the girl at the cash register, maybe she was although she filled out that peasant blouse a little better and that was why I thought she was waiting on tables and the other gal was on the door. Like I told Seth before when they asked for the cover charge I only thought I had enough dough to get home, and maybe a few cents left over. Seth who must have gotten a couple of high roller good guys to caddy for that day and said he was flush said he would cover me because it was important to him that I follow this folk scene that had him all wired up.

It was at that moment that I was “christened” into the mores of the folk scene as it was emerging around Boston. See in order to keep your seat at one of these coffeehouses unlike the Waldorf in Riverdale where as long as you weren’t disturbing anybody you could sit and wait for the bus or just sit and watch the winos like Willie the Wino suck down some watered-down coffee after a hard day or night of twisting with a wine bottle or sitting in Tonio’s Pizza Parlor, our corner boy hang out then which Tonio was happy to let us do since it brought girls in you had to have something in front of you, a cup of coffee slowly sipped anyway. Otherwise somebody who might be waiting outside, fat chance that night, who could pay the freight should by rights grab your seat. That night the situation got resolved by Seth forking up the dough for two coffees and a shared brownie just to make sure we were covered. When the coffee came, steaming coffee with milk somehow foaming on top of it and I sipped it I liked the tastes immediately. I had never had coffee so strong even my mother’s percolated with egg shells thrown in for good measure.                   

After that I made my first mistake though. I asked Seth, just in passing, just to kill time until Doris came on the stage, just to seem like I was interested in case one of the girls at the adjoining tables was listening so they would think I knew something about the new trend whether it made me grind my teeth or not, why he was taking notes about the performer and whatever else he was writing about. Here is the mistake in asking Seth any kind of open-ended question like that because the opening allowed him to go on and on about the ten thousand facts he knows about whatever interested him even if not strictly on the subject. See as long as I had known Seth, unlike the other guys on the corner who maybe dreamed of working in an auto shop, maybe pumping gas for a living, maybe getting a job on the town work force, a fireman or public works department job, maybe a white collar job in the town hall Seth had dreams of being a reporter, although he always called it being a journalist, and usually prefaced that designation with the words “big time.” So as boring as those then thousand facts were to the corner boys, including me, as much as any of us could give a rat’s ass about whatever came into his mind his idea was that knowing all that stuff was his ticket away from poverty, away from that white collar town job his mother was always telling he should aim for as the highlight of his life.     

So after telling me that Minnie Murphy, the editor of the school newspaper The Magnet, had promised him she would publish an article by him on this new folk music craze that she too was getting crazy about and which kind of surprised me because I thought Seth was the only goof in town who even knew about the thing he proceeded as usual to give me everything I didn’t want to know about, didn’t give a rat’s ass about the scene. Told me that there were lots of people who were tired of the goof stuff that was passing for rock and roll in those benighted times, tired of the bubble gum music that even I was tired off even if this folk stuff was making me grind my teeth. Told me a bunch of college students and other people with time on their hands had gone all over the country to squirrely places like Appalachia which I was not sure where it was and down in Mississippi which I did know because all hell was breaking out there with black people (who in our neighborhood we called the “N” word almost universally except maybe Seth, and maybe he did too when he hung around the corner and guys were bitching about what did the damn “n---gers” want anyway I don’t remember exactly). Said people were crazy to find stuff that a guy named Child, Francis Child, had put together from the old old days, back in the 16^th century or thereabouts and that I would find out first-hand about that very night. Told me people, folksingers like Doris Nelson were beginning to make money, make a job kind of money doing.

Seth, although maybe on nights when Willie the Wino came through for us and we had too much Southern Comfort which really could rot, hell, fuck up your brain he would do so, never claimed he had discovered folk music, never claimed that he had the “Word” as he called it but after hearing a “fugitive” radio station (his term) from Providence one night, WBIL I think he said it had been, what later proved to be the Brown University radio station by mistake one night, started grooving on the sound he made a mental note to explore what the whole thing was about. Told me at the Turk’s Head that the reason he had cornered Minnie Murphy was that he expected to ride the wave of the folk scene to a “big time” reporter’s job using this folk scene as a stepping stone. This school newspaper article was to be the first step and if he played his cards right he might get noticed by guys around Harvard Square who were busy writing songs, songs which I will get to in a while, writing about their “discoveries” of some ancient ballad that song people in Prestonsburg down in Kentucky were singing, had been singing since their forbears were kicked out of England  and then either couldn’t make it  on the coastal cities of the East or got kicked out of there as well, and writing about the guys who were writing the songs and making the latest folk ballad discoveries.

That was what Seth wanted to do so badly that he could taste it. (My term and not meant as a compliment either.) This was pure Seth for as long as I had known him when he had his million facts hat on. He had a lot more to say or he would have had a lot more to say except that Mimi girl who clipped us for four bucks was now on stage getting ready to introduce this Doris Nelson. The usual emcee build-up for whatever act was in front of them, the role of “flaks” since they invented them. Some stuff about how she had been classically-trained from childhood and had given that up to sing the “people’s music.” Pure flak.               

No question Doris was a dark-haired, tall, ruby-red lipped beauty although like I said before about girls in the room she was dressed and wore her hair like half the girls sitting at the mismatched tables around the place. (I found out later that her friend Joan Baez whom she had gone to school with at BU, had had a couple of classes with had started the trend, the “look,” or was one of the starters). After a few stumblebum hardly audible hem and haw words of introduction to the song, which struck me as odd since she was being touted by Mimi as this new breed singer-songwriter about how some guy named Cecil Sharpe had discovered the song, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, she started to strum her guitar which seemed too big for her and which given how small the stage was kept banging against the walls when she swayed to the melody of the song if that was what she was doing. She had a big voice, no question either, but every time she hit the high note on “fair and tender” she made my teeth grind even more. Made me almost long for some bubblegum music by any one of about fifty popular teenage-oriented female singers.

Get this and you will get just the slightest inkling why I was getting a big headache that night. The story line of the song, what Seth started to call “the narrative” after he had read some guy named Irving something used the term when dealing with these endless ballads was about some gal, a country gal who probably was pretty gullible and naïve anyway about men who had been two-timed by her man, which could only mean one thing-that she had given into his lusts or maybe hers-a theme I would hear constantly later except sometimes it would be the gal doing the two-timing. She wanted revenge or at least have the guy feel remorse. Christ who wanted to listen to that stuff from olden times for about ten  minutes when you could get the Shirelles to sing a short and sweet story about a gal wondering if her guy will still love her tomorrow-done in two minutes and some change.

Then Doris did a series of high-pitched wails, hoots if you asked me, about some sea captain who was poking his cabin boy only he was a she and got pregnant. Jesus who gave a fuck. After that bummer she went gentle on some obscure song from that Child guy’s list, a ballad she called it, about a guy named Geordie. Seemed he was from royalty, had bedded, married or not, some fair damsel who had three kids whether by him or by some cuckolded husband wasn’t clear to me, had been short on dough when he cashed in by poaching some of the king’s deer, a capital offense if caught and he was, was sentenced and ready to be hanged and quartered or whatever they did to get rid of poachers in those dark ages days. The fair damsel rode to London and tried to talk the judge out of it but no soap and I guess old Geordie swung for his misdeeds. Again she made my teeth go cuckoo chattering when she hit the high notes, started going wah-wah. Seth kept trying to keep me quiet since the place was so small Doris probably heard every curse I threw her way. Jesus again.     

I could keep going on about that dragged night and  it would be more of the same but I would like to mention her last song, her encore song which Seth had jumped up and led the audience in asking for. He told me later that he saw he really needed a personal interview with her to round out the article he was thinking through all that night. Here is what you maybe don’t know, maybe you do, but let me say that the so-called “ah, shucks” folkies were as susceptible to such claptrap as any Broadway show tune performer. Almost immediately after Seth called “encore” she was tuning up that runaway guitar for her big ending. Later, a few years later, when I got hip to stuff about the music industry, I would find out that performers would do an encore even if not one soul in the whole place asked for it. I remember one guy didn’t even bother to leave the stage to be acclaimed by popular demand that they wanted an encore but just blatantly said he was too tired to go backstage and so here was the encore.

But back to the song, the ballad another one of those damn endless Child ballads that this Doris seemed to specialize in (and which Seth once he got his foot in the door would write endlessly about and expect people to take seriously). This one Barbara Allan, although she called it Barbarreeee or something like that Allan would try the patience of Job or one of those old time righteous prophets since she decided that she would sing it in Middle English, in other words, sing it like somebody in Shakespeare’s time, maybe earlier would sing the thing to whatever audience he was pitching to. After the first verse I almost walked out the door but Seth pulled me back by promising to pay my bus fare home if I just waited until the end. The story here which even Seth did not understand that night but only caught up with later when he looked in the library at school for the modern lyrics was some royal guy or some young noble who was in love with an inevitable fair maiden. Except she thought he had slighted her, had as has been going on since men and women started hanging out together, not been paying enough attention to her as against other women in their crowd at the tavern. Brushed off by his true love fair maiden he took ill rather than moving on. Started to take that road to the grim reaper. Sent emissary after emissary to see if she would come and see him before he passed away from a broken heart. No soap. No soap until she showed up pretty late just as he was about to expire. Sensing that she had wronged him she too “died for love” and they were buried next to each other in sanctified ground as far as Seth could tell. Get this as is the nature of things growing on the world on the guy’s grave grew a rose and on the fair maiden’s a briar which after some time passed intertwined. People applauded after Doris finished this downer. Can you believe in the year 1962 that some half-intelligent woman thought she could breakout in the music world singing that rubbish. (As it turned out Doris could although as part of a singing duo with Henrietta Hardwick as Two For The Road and with modern material just to let you know where I was at then as far as my predictive abilities went.)     

So I was no stranger to “folk scene” when Seth barrel-assed his little favor non-favor at me to help him out with his Sal problem about going to the Club Nana over in Cambridge. I might as well tell you now that I never figured that Sal-Seth attraction, mutual attraction I might add because they stayed together until the end of Seth’s sophomore year in college when Sal went to try to make a name for herself in the folk scene in New York down at the Village and didn’t want to wait for Seth to finish school and then head down there. She said the folk minute might be over by then and she would lose her chance in get out from under her parents’ thumb, now was the time to prove what the local Cambridge scene aficionados were saying about her talent. Sal was closer to the truth than she knew since by then the British invasion with the Beatles and the Stones was sucking all the air out of any marginal kinds of musical expression, especially for people who were just then trying to break into the folk scene and Seth lost track of her although she had made a few records and opened for a few bigger acts before she disappeared from our radar out West somewhere, not California West but maybe Utah or someplace like that where they didn’t like people swearing either, were scornful of heathens as well.

We were never friendly not even that night at the Nana, even though I think I only swore once and then said I was sorry but she always seemed to have a permanent scowl on her face for me which made that beautiful face of hers seem ugly to me. And it wasn’t because of her religious background which other than her almost reflexive hatred for swearing in her presence she wore pretty lightly around school. I was kicking my own Catholic background so I could have given a fuck about her religious principles. You know I really think she was giving Seth something at least a blow job because Seth was the kind of guy around the corner who was not known for dealing with goof girls even if they were pretty, maybe especially because they were pretty. The only thing that got him anywhere with that proposition to me about double-dating was that he said he would cover my expenses. With that and with Laura as the lure he tagged me.  Tagged me despite my reservations about going with him and Sal since like I said Sal was very prissy about language, about swearing so I thought that I would spent most of my time keeping my mouth shut. Tagged me although he greased the pole about folk music by saying that this Erick Saint-Jean was the new cat’s meow and very different from that Doris Nelson performance which even he admitted long after the fact was not to everybody’s taste-anybody in the 20^th century I told him back.  

 

 

The Saturday night we went to see Erick at Club Nana started out okay. Naturally since Sal’s parents had to be appeased we met at her house for the inspection and the interrogation which I got used to the few times later I wound up with double-date, hell, double-duty with Seth on one of his and Sal’s adventures to the coffeehouse scene. The inspection apparently was to see if I had two heads or something or if Laura was a loose woman or something. The interrogation part Seth had briefed us on, Laura and me, since Sal’s parents would be sure to ask us where we were going and we had to answer about going to a social where there would be hymns singing the praises of the Lord and such. We made it through the gauntlet okay as they kind of beamed that four young people were going to a good church social on a Saturday in this day in age and wasn’t it a sign, or something. Yeah, end times sign of something. We then headed toward Thornton Street where the Eastern Massachusetts bus depot was located in order to take the bus to connect up with the Redline subway at Field’s Corner in the roughneck section of Dorchester and head to Harvard Square at the end of the line (then). As we walked along Thornton Street Laura said to Seth that she had read his article about Doris Nelson in the Magnet and after complimenting him on the piece said she was looking forward to hearing Erick Saint-Jean whom she had heard about from her cousin who lived in New York where he had appeared as the front act for Pete Seeger at the famous Gaslight Coffeehouse.    

That remark made me cringe, made me feel that I was doomed that evening because Laura had made the cardinal sin with Seth of expressing the slightest interest in whatever he was hot under the collar about which turned out to be this Erick guy. Moreover he expected all of us “non-folkies” he called us to give him our candid opinions of Erick’s performance since he was “on assignment” for the Magnet after Minnie Murphy had published his first article (after some heavy re-write by her which would plague Seth all his writing career like publications, small presses and journals mostly, had infinite space for whatever he had to say from the mountain and he could not keep it under five thousand words when the publisher had asked him for say three thousand). I told him right then and there, right in front of Laura who seemed to be gravitating toward folkie-dom since she was wearing a peasant blouse that evening, an outfit which I had never seen her wear before since she usually filled out tight cashmere sweaters rather nicely and thankfully had a great big head of bee-hive styled blonde hair, that he could save time and register my answer right there and say that the stuff made my teeth grind.       

Hell, before I could take it back Seth started in again on this Erick so I turned out to be no smarter that Laura about playing to Seth’s vanities as he started to tell us why this Erick was the next big thing. Fortunately, I thought, the Greyhound bus arrived just then and we got on after Seth paid all our fares. But Seth when he got on his soapbox would not let it go and so all the way to Dorchester he droned on and on about Erick. Gave us his history seemingly from when he was a baby although that part I drowned out and did not pick up his story until Seth mentioned that he had gone to Harvard for a couple of years before he dropped out to “follow his muse” was what Seth called it. I found it strange that a guy who could make Harvard, had the smarts to get in which we all recognized in the poor ass Acre neighborhood where we grew up was a big deal would give up a ticket to success for some iffy music career which might last a minute or a century who knew. I mentioned this to Seth as we were riding the bus since we had talked about this whole college thing, the struggle to get into any decent school, when we were hanging around in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor one Friday night on a night when we had no dough and no dates, and no prospects of a date and he replied that Erick had already had one of his original folk songs recorded and on sale, Light Rain Falling, which he would play that night and was working on recording his latest song A Time Is Coming said to be a sure-fire hit according to the reporter from the Village Voice who was present at the Gaslight in the Village the night Erick fronted for Pete Seeger. I still was not convinced that he had made the right decision but I kept that to myself.         

During the subway ride to Harvard Square the clacking and clicking of the trains kept Seth quiet although he seemed to be whispering stuff to Sal that made her laugh, probably some high heaven hymn about God’s righteousness and seeking mercy on wicked humankind. Laura was a bit cool to me for most of the evening until then especially after I made that crack (her term which she used when describing her coolness that first night later when we were on better terms-much better terms, okay) about folk music making my teeth grind since she had gone out of her way to buy a peasant blouse for the occasion after her cousin had told her the what’s what about looking cool on the emerging folk scene. I explained to her my experience with Seth at the Doris Nelson concert but she only said that this Erick was something different, was something of a star rising with his off-beat humor and his drilling the right spots on his lyrics which she called (citing her cousin) “protest music.” That Light Rain Falling had been a heartfelt plea for the government to stop making nuclear weapons, stop testing them wherever the hell they wanted, stop building up the stockpiles and let the world live and not worry our next breathes, if there were to be any. That last remark gave me much better idea of what Laura was about, told me she was more than a good-looking social butterfly who only spent her waking hours on all the silly school committees like the seasonal dances and sports’ pep club and I started to hone in on her a little more. Started asking what else her cousin told her about Erick, about this folk scene that we would enter just as soon as we got up the two flights of stairs to breath in Harvard Square air proper as we hit the last stop on the line.   

As we surfaced Seth went crazy telling us about the Hayes-Bickford that was right in front of us. The one in Riverdale we avoided like the plague because it had steamed everything and if you got there say an hour after the food had been put on the steam table then it was basically inedible. The Hayes moreover was for winos like Willie the Wino when he was looking for a change of scenery from the Waldorf or had been kicked out for pan-handling or otherwise abusing the real paying customers. But this Hayes was, had been for a while, the afterhours hangout first for the now passé “beatniks” and their endless poetry readings and writings and now for guys like Bob Dylan who would write notes on the paper napkins provided by the place and tuck them in the pocket of his disheveled jacket probably to be turned into lyrics for a song. So everybody who heard about what was happening in Harvard Square made the pilgrimage to the Hayes to see who was doing what, what new songs were being gestated there among the steamed vegetables and weak-kneed coffee poured into those ceramic mugs that seemed indestructible. Seth noted that Erick, who lived in a garret up on the other end of Mount Auburn Street, had actually written A Time Is Coming at a table at the Hayes one rainy night when he was there with his muse, his girlfriend, Henrietta Hardwick (the same gal who would successfully team up with Doris Nelson as a duet with modern material), although Erick would mention her at his performance as his paramour which Seth said was the same thing when I asked him what that meant at intermission. 

Even though Seth had snuck out of the family house in Riverdale several times by himself late at night to head to the Square and the Hayes hang-out trying to see what was what (and avoiding the after midnight winos, college drunks, hustlers and con artists who descended on the place late especially when it turned into the favored after hours hang-out of many local young up and coming folk artists) he had never been at the fairly new Club Nana since these places were popping up all over the Square so he asked somebody where it was located and it turned out that the club was in the building adjacent to the Brattle Theater a few blocks down from the Hayes. We found the place no problem since we saw a long line forming outside the club as it was not open then as we had along with those others in that line arrived early. Seth, seeing the line, was worried we would not get a table, would not get in for Erick’s first set and was bitching about how we should have taken the earlier bus and all that. I thought to myself that no way would the place fill up just like it hadn’t at the Turk’s Head because although a few guys like Seth and his kind were into this folk scene everybody else was still going cuckoo over rock and roll or stuff like that who were into music (hell, Laura, even that night mentioned that she still had a strong “crush” on teen idol Ricky Nelson, hell and damn him). As it turned out there was no waiting at the Club that night unlike later occasions since it was significantly larger that the Turk’s Head (and not in the freaking basement with a crossbeam to hit your head on to boot), had about thirty tables for twos and fours although the furniture was all mismatched just like at the Turk’s Head. Nobody was spending money on that stuff, on matching furniture, and nobody probably gave a damn what they sat on as long as they got in and were not positioned behind a pole so they couldn’t see the stage which was always the curse of every concert venue. The stage here was the same small dinky one like at the Turk’s Head just barely enough for the performer to perform if he or she was not too big and played the piccolo.

Here’s where I started to get a better frame of mind about this folk thing (besides that unspoken threat that Laura was getting dragged into the milieu and if I was to have a chance with her I had better think twice about my earlier opinions about the genre or do a better job of keeping it to myself-or be more public about how nice she looked in a peasant blouse although frankly she still looked tons better in a tight cashmere sweater and probably always would). No cover charge. Yes, unlike the Turk’s Head over on Charles Street in the Back Bay which pretty much had the field to itself and so could rob us of two bucks each to hear some old garbled ballads in some weird language from the Middle Ages plus having to buy coffees to keep in front of you and keep your place, the new Club Nana had stiff competition from the myriad other folk clubs and coffeehouses that covered about a six blocks in the heart of the Square.

Of course there was the even then famous Club 47 and the up and coming Café Blue leading the pack where the more recognized performers like Dylan and Joan played and where you waited, patiently or impatiently as was your wont, in line outside (or got there at some ridiculously early time to wait in that freaking line, forget it) so the lesser clubs like the Algiers and Idler and now the Nana had to pitch their tents in the  shadows and offer some reason to take a left to Brattle Street rather than a right to Mount Auburn Street and so the “no cover charge” was the draw. As for the Nana, as the owner and emcee Barry Bowditch explained that first night before introducing Erich for his first set, that club was attempting to be the new hangout for the next run of up and coming folk artists to present their wares, to perfect their acts just like the 47 and Blue had done in their turn. Still you needed to keep that ubiquitous cup of coffee in front of you, maybe needed a sweet and low pastry out of smell necessity since Barry had a small bakery next door working up the smell factor, if you wanted to keep your place in the pecking order. But it was nice to know I would not owe Seth four extra dollars later on when I had some dough.  (Come on you know guys were expected to pay the freight for the girl then-if he expected to get anywhere-otherwise somebody like Laura whatever she might have thought of the new breeze folk thing would have been a “no show” for this kind of date if it was Dutch treat. She told me once later after we had been going together for a while that if she had wanted to, or had been expected to pay her part she would not have shown-she could have gone out with her Dutch treat girlfriends).            

Once we were seated, grabbed our coffees and cakes from the good-looking college girl waitress (from Emerson College who was slumming as a waitress to get close to the folk scene since she like what appeared to be half the Harvard Square world was a budding folk-singer) we sat listening to some piped in music. One song interested me, Viva La Quince Brigada sung by a guy named Woody Guthrie, a song that Seth told me was about the Spanish Civil War, was about Americans who fought there in the 1930s in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15^th International Brigade to save the Spanish Republic when it was attacked by the local fascists under General Franco who still ran the show there. (Seth gave me that military designation for the Lincolns which he had found out about when he was doing a tern paper in 9^th grade for a Civics class and he picked the Spanish Civil War as his topic.) The beauty of the song sung in Spanish was that I could follow the lyrics because I knew enough Spanish from my second-year Spanish class to understand what the song was getting at. Of course the rest of the period before Barry came up on that small stage to introduce Erick was the usual folk ballad bummer. A song about some guy in Ohio who murdered his sweetheart because she would not marry him and what remorse he had after he did the deed (and about facing the hangman’s noose and/or God’s wrath as well for his indiscretion). Another song about a guy named Matty Grove who stole some nobleman’s wife, lived with her for a while, the nobleman came by and killed Matty then the errant wife after which he too had remorse-for the wife’s murder not Matty’s if you can believe that. I swear this song was the same one Doris Nelson sang at the Turk’s head except this version had a different name, was even longer, even endlessly longer going into the nobleman’s motivation for wasting Matty, his sense of honor abused which needed to be avenged, and the methods he would employ in order do poor Matty boy in.  There might have been a few other songs but the only other one I remember was a silly song about some muleskinner who was sick of his work and wanted to break out, wanted to ride the range I guess, his desire to break out not half as much as mine as I was getting antsy waiting for the show to begin. Laura sensed that and started making small talk about how she liked that Matty Grove song, felt bad for the guy Matty who was taking good care of his lady but that when the deal went down that illicit affair was doomed anyway since nobles and commoners didn’t mix so well then whatever role love played in the scheme of things. When I kept silent rather than bursting out laughing she shifted to small talk high school social butterfly stuff, did I know about the Spring Frolic Dance and how hard her committee had been working to make it a success (and which I would wind up taking her too, actually proudly taking her too since that was the first public, meaning school the only place that mattered, appearance. I feigned interest (as I would many times later when she brought up one of her endless committee assignments-she would no matter how deeply she was involved with the Harvard Square scene never outgrow that butterfly thing-never saw a reason to do so I guess).   

Finally Barry saved the day. Came up on stage and gave a few minute introduction about Erick after telling us about fire exits, about making sure we had something wink, wink to eat or drink in front of us for the duration since that no cover charge meant there was dough for food so don’t be stingy, be generous with the hard-working waitresses, and a few upcoming events including a Tuesday night “open mic” search for new talent to get featured on New Talent Thursday Nights (which would be the next time I heard Doris Nelson in person the first time she partnered with Harriet Hardwick). Then Erich showed up behind him. 

This Erich was long and tall, angular, had to have some WASP blood in him despite the Gallic surname because he wreaked of Yankee brethren as only a kid who had been drilled to perdition about the bloody English forebears and their mad policies in Ireland before Easter 1916. He wore what for what would be for guys, folk guys, “the uniform.” Long hair, longer than what dear mother would have liked to see, a wisp of a beard, unusual and always associated with beatniks in our neighborhood hence by mother’s and others with uncleanliness and evil intent, a plaid flannel shirt, brown, black chinos, a red handkerchief hanging out of the back pocket and work boots against all weathers. (And yes I wore that same “uniform” for a while before I got a real uniform of khaki greens courtesy of the United States government in hellhole Vietnam.). He had a strong baritone voice and as he strummed his weather-beaten guitar I, and the others at my table and probably the house too, knew this guy was a serious guitar player from the first strums.   

But enough of wardrobe descriptions and skills speculation because Erick didn’t speak too much but rather let his songs speak for him. Something in the force of his voice got to me. That Light Rain Falling had all the pathos of a song about the very real possibility of the world exploding on itself if the nuclear war we all feared to the marrow of our bones actually occurred. A Time Is Coming spoke of some new thing in the world, about the end times of the old stagnant world and its stuffy rigid order and falsity, not just folk music but a new way of people dealing with each other and you had better get on board or get left behind. Fair Winds Or Foul spoke to me in the same vein except Erick’s  spin on the subject was that there was going to be opposition, that the bad guys running the show now were not going to let the new breeze take over, were going to fight back, fight back hard, would crush our spirits in the process. Our Hour spoke of the twists and turns ahead, that not everybody was going to stay the course when the new breeze hit, not everybody was made for the road, for all-night talking, for living very simply and for experimenting with everything from drugs to communal living, and his encore song Sabrina spoke of lost love despite him jumping through hoops for the woman named in the song, a song that seemed autobiographical and recent. (It was, was about a young woman from Radcliffe who couldn’t see Erick going the folk music root and who had her feet firmly planted on the ground. As it turned out Harriet Hardwick had come along just after that and eased the pain, as did writing the song as he mentioned at the end of the song.)    

Of course since Erick was just starting out he did covers some by Pete Seeger he told the audience that Pete had showed him how to play on the guitar like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and a song by that same Woody Guthrie who I had heard earlier in the evening over the sound system, one that I really liked about going to California and having dough or don’t go which I was crazy to go to, dough or no dough.  

Okay here’s the grift. When Erich was finished I was the guy who yelled encore and he gave us the melancholy Sabrina in return. As the lights came on to clear out the joint I mentioned to Laura that I thought the show was great. She smiled and agreed. Once we got outside and headed to the late hour subway I was the one who was going on and on about what Erick said about the new breeze coming, about how if guys and gals sang stuff like he did then maybe we would get the new breeze, would get a shot at making something of the world as we were coming of age. For once I outtalked Seth. Oh yeah, and told him that while those old time folk ballads still made my teeth grind guys like Erick had something to say. Oh yeah too, as I left Laura at her door I mentioned that maybe the next weekend we could go to Harvard Square by ourselves and see what was what. She smiled and agreed. Whoa!

[Post Script: many years later Seth Garth as he was ready to retire after what for him had been a reasonably successful career first as a music critic for various alternative newspapers and small press journals and then as a free-lance writer for publication big and small on a whole range of topics from culture to politics to self-help tips (don’t laugh those pieces got at least three kids from various marriages, three altogether through college and graduate school) he started receiving almost weekly CD compilations in the mail asking him to review the CD for a nice little check. Most of them he dismissed out of hand since that nice little check was little enough for him to dismiss out of hand now that he was no longer on his way to the poor house trying to put six, count them, six kids through all forms of higher education, although it was a close thing for a while.

But one from old friend Sid Daniels the producer of compilations of folk music minute songs for Roundabout Records geared to the baby-boomers who came of age on that material and had enough nostalgia and dough to make producing such materials financially worthwhile. After listening to the CD, Urban Folks Blues Seth started to wonder what had happened to some of those artists and agreed to do a review for Sid on that basis.

See everybody knew that the “king of the hill” Bob Dylan had embarked on what would eventually be a never-ending tour and that prior to his death Dave Von Ronk would show up regularly on the dwindling folk circuit, the few places scattered in the universe where there were enough old folkies to sustain a coffeehouse-you know Ann Arbor, Berkeley, the Village, Harvard Square- or if away from those old-time centers then some thoughtful monthly coffeehouses at UU churches or places like that. But Seth was not thinking about the fates of those guys which had been well documented but a guy like Erick Saint-James who back in the day looked like he would threaten Dylan for that “king of the hill” title.  

Erick Saint- James had it all going for him, a strong baritone, good basic guitar skills, knew a dozen chords or so, which as one wag mentioned at the time was all you needed to get a place in the folk universe, better, have all the girls hanging around you. Erick in addition was a good-looking guy who graced many covers of Rise Up Singing Folk, the original “must read” publication that got many young folkies their first look see. He had big hits with covers like Railroad Bill but also with his own compositions like the classic A Time Is Coming, Falling Light Rain, and Panama Woman Special. Then a few years later he fell off the folk map. Seth had spent many hours starting out in the business tracing the whereabouts of every possible folksinger in order to keep up with the movement in order to grab free-lance jobs once editors like Benny Gold and Sam Lawrence knew that he had enough knowledge to write quick reviews when they were pressed for publication time-lines so he referred back to his backlog of notes for starters.   

So Seth had worked his way back. Found out that Erick had had a streak of bad luck, bad management, a bum agent who took a lot of his dough, who lost a lot on bad deal buy-backs and at the track, both things besides talent which you need to have working for, not against, you. Had a few songs, a couple of albums that went nowhere. Of course that was around the edge of the folk minute, the point where folk rock was the place to be or get off the boat. That was the main musical fact of life of the time. Old time ballad went into the dustbin, went back to where someday a new crop of folk archivist would wonder what the fuck they were talking about. Part of Seth’s loss of Erick’s whereabouts had been that Seth had sensed another wave coming and he was on the envelope of what would later be called the “acid” rock moment and so had let whatever he knew about folk kind of fall off of his planet. That was where his career was heading, where he was getting assignments and so the fate of stray folk guys like Erick faded in the background. That too was a hard fact of life just ask Benny or Sam. 

Then Erick hit some skids, got caught up doing too much alcohol and later too much grass, then heroin. As far as Seth could trace that decline into the late 1980s that was what had happened to Erick. One source said he went down to Mexico to study painting while he was trying to dry out. Another said that he was down in some Jersey Holiday Inn doing a lounge lizard act for coffee and cakes. In any case the trail ended around 1990 so who knows what happened to him. All Seth knew was that back in the day Erick could cover the old time folk songs, worked at it and added a few gems to the folk section of the American songbook. Yeah, if you want to know what it was like when guys and gals sang folk for keeps, when Erick Saint-James sang folk for keeps grab Sid’s compilation CD. Listen to Dave, Tom, Geoff, Tracey and Jesse too but weep a tear for Erick and your lost youth as well.]      

An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-Take Two

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

[My old friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since the summer of love days out in Frisco days in the late 1960s when we though all the world could be turned upside down and we were the hail fellows, well met who were going to help do it and all we got for our troubles was tear gas, cops' nightsticks and the bastinado for our efforts, oh yeah, and forty year blow-back from the night-takers, and who hails from Carver down in Massachusetts asked me to fill in a few more details about this relationship between Motorcycle Bill and Lily. He thought I was originally kind of skimpy on why a nice Catholic girl would go all to pieces over a motorcycle guy, would get on his bike like she was some low-rent tart from the wrong side of town the usual type that went for motorcycle guys in his book. Sam didn’t get the idea that when that cycle surge came along just like us with the heroic antics of the summer of love lots of ordinary teens went with the flow. So here is a little extra, a take two for Sam, and maybe for others who missed that big motorcycle moment.]      

 ********

There was a scourge in the land, in the 1950s American land. No, not the one you are thinking of from your youth or from your history book, not the dreaded but fatalistically expected BIG ONE, the mega-bomb that would send old mother earth back to square one, or worst, maybe only the amoebas would survive to start the long train of civilization up the hill once again. Everybody expected that blow to come if it did come and we in America were not vigilant, did not keep our shoulders to the wheel and not ask questions from the nefarious Russkies (of course we that were just coming to age in the rock and roll night would not have had a clue as to what questions to ask if asking questions was acceptable then and it was not and we as young as were knew that it was not from parents to teachers to Grandpa Ike and his cabinet). We, if not vigilant, would take it in the back from a guy named Joe Stalin which one of our teachers said meant “steel” in Russian but it could have been from any Russian guy as we learned later after Stalin died and other atomic bomb-wielding guys took over in Red Square.

Sure that red scare Cold War was in the air and every school boy and girl had their giggling tales of having to hide, hide ass up, under some desk or other useless defense in air raid drill preparations for that eventually. I wasn’t any revolutionary or radical or “red” although one teacher looked at me kind of funny when I mentioned it but I couldn’t get behind the purpose of hiding under some old-timey elementary school wooden desk when every film I ever saw of what an atomic blast looked like said you might as well not have your ass sticking up in the air when Armageddon came. Like I said one teacher looked at me very funny. So sure the air stunk of red scare, military build-up cold war “your mommy is a commie turn her in" (and there were foolish kids who did try to use that ploy when dear mother said no to some perfectly reasonable request and junior thought to get even he would rat her out).

But the red scare, the Cold War ice tamp down on society to go along to get along was not the day to day scare for every self-respecting parent from Portsmouth to the Pacific. That fear was reserved for the deadly dreaded motorcycle scare that had every father telling his son to beware of falling under the Marlon Brando sway once they had seen the man complete with leather jacket, rakish cap and surly snarl playing Johnny Bad in The Wild One at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon and deciding contrary to the cautionary tale of the film that these Johnnies were losers spiraling down to a life, a low life of crime and debauchery (of course said son not knowing of the word, the meaning of debauchery, until much later) just shrugged his innocent shoulders.

More importantly, more in need of a five alarm warning, every mother, every blessed mother, self-respecting or not, secretly thinking maybe a toss in the hay with Marlon would bring some spice to her otherwise staid ranch house with breezeway existence warned off their daughters against this madness and perversity in leather. Warned those gleaming-eyed daughters also fresh from the Saturday afternoon matinee Stand Theater to not even think about hanging with such rascals contrary to the lesson that cute waitress in the film gave about blowing Johnny off as so much bad air. (Of course forgetting, as dad had with junior, to bring up the question of sex which is what Sissy had on her mind after one look at that cool attire of Johnny and her dream about how she could get that surly smirk off of his face.)     

Of course that did not stop the wayward sons of millworkers slated for work in the mills when their times came from mooning over every Harley cat that rode his ride down Main Street, Olde Saco (really U.S. Route One but everybody called it Main Street and it was) or the daughters slated for early motherhood under proper marriage or maybe sales clerks in the Monmouth Store from mooning (and maybe more) over the low- riders churning the metal on those bad ass machines when they went with their girlfriends over to Old Orchard Beach on sultry sweaty weekend nights in summer.

This is how bad things were, how the cool cats on the bikes sucked the air out of any other guys who were looking for, well, looking whatever they could get from the bevies of girls watching their every move like hawks. Even prime and proper Lily Dumont, the queen of Saint Brigitte’s Catholic Church rectitude on Sunday and wanna-be “mama” every other waking minute of late. Now this Lily was “hot” no question so hot that my best friend in high school Rene Dubois, the best looking guy around the Acre where we all lived and who already had two girlfriends (and later in life would have four, count them, four wives before he gave the marriage game up and just shacked up with whatever romantic interest he had at the moment), would go to eight o’clock Mass every Sunday and sit a couple of rows in back of her and just watch her ass. (I know because I was sitting beside him watching that same ass).


He never got anywhere with her, she knew about the two girlfriends since they were friends of hers, and neither did I. Lily was a classic French-Canadian beauty long thin legs, petite shape but with nice curves, long black hair and pop-out blue eyes. Nice but like I said but strictly the ice queen as far as we could tell. Especially when she would constantly talk about her friendship with Jesus and the need to say plenty of rosaries and attend many novenas to keep in touch with him.        

In this time of the motorcycle craze though something awoken in her, maybe just the realization that Jesus was okay but guys who thought she was hot maybe needed some tending too. In any case, and I didn’t find this out until several years later after Lily had left town, my sister who was one of Lily’s close friends then and Lily could confide girl talk to her during this motorcycle dust up Lily would find herself restless at night, late at night and contrary to all good Catholic teachings would put her hand in a place where she shouldn’t (this is the way my sister put it you know Lily was just playing  with herself a perfectly natural feeling for teenagers, and older people too) and she was embarrassed about it, didn’t know if she could go to confession and say what sin she committed to old Father Pierre. I don’t know if she ever did confess or things got resolved a different way and that idea was out of play but there you have it.     

And the object of her desire? One “Motorcycle Bill,” the baddest low- rider in all of Olde Saco. Now baddest in Olde Saco (that’s up in ocean edge Maine for the heathens and others not in the know) was not exactly baddest in the whole wide world, nowhere as near as bad as say Sonny Barger and his henchmen outlaws-for- real bikers out in Hell’s Angels Oakland as chronicled by Doctor Gonzo (before he was Gonzo), Hunter S. Thompson in his saga of murder and mayhem sociological- literary study Hell’s Angels. But as much is true in life one must accept the context. And the context here is that in sleepy dying mill town Olde Saco mere ownership, hell maybe mere desire for ownership, of a bike was prima facie evidence of badness. So every precious daughter was specifically warned away from Motorcycle Bill and his Vincent Black Lightning 1952 (although no mother, and maybe no daughter either, could probably tell the difference between that sleek English bike and a big pig Harley). But Madame Dumont felt no need to do so with her sweet sixteen Lily who, maybe, pretty please maybe was going to be one of god’s women, maybe enter the convent over in Cedars Of Lebanon Springs in a couple of years after she graduated from Olde Saco High along with her Class of 1960.

But that was before Motorcycle Bill appeared on the horizon. One afternoon after school walking home to Olde Saco’s French- Canadian (F-C) quarter, the Acre like I said where we all lived, all French-Canadians (on my mother’s side, nee LeBlanc for me) on Atlantic Avenue with classmate and best friend Clara Dubois (my sister was close to Lily but not as close as Clara since they had gone to elementary school together), Lily heard the thunder of Bill’s bike coming up behind them, stopping, Bill giving Lily a bow, and them revving the machine up and doing a couple of circle cuts within a hair’s breathe of the girls. Then just a suddenly he was off, and Lily, well, Lily was hooked, hooked on Motorcycle Bill, although she did not know it, know it for certain until that night in her room when she tossed and turned all night and did not ask god, or any of his associates, to guide her in the matter (the matter of that wayward hand for those who might have forgotten).

One thing about living in a sleepy old town, a sleepy old dying mill town, is that everybody knows everybody’s business at least as far as any person wants that information out on the public square. Two things are important before we go on. One is that everybody in town that counted which meant every junior and senior class high schooler in Olde Saco knew that Bill had made a “play” for Lily. And the buzz got its start from none other than Clara Dubois who had her own hankerings after the motorcycle man (her source of wonder though was more, well lets’ call it crass than Lily’s, Clara wanted to know if Bill was build, build with some sexual power, power like his motorcycle. She had innocently, perhaps, understood the Marlon mystique). The second was that Bill, other than his bike, was not a low life low- rider but just a guy who liked to ride the roads free and easy. See Bill was a freshman over at Bowdoin and he used the bike as much to get back and forth to school from his home in Scarborough as to do wheelies in front of impressionable teenage girls from the Acre.

One day, one afternoon, a few days after their Motorcycle Bill “introduction,” when Lily and Clara were over at Seal Rock at the far end of Olde Saco Beach Bill came up behind them sans his bike. (Not its real name but had been given the name Seal Rock because the place was the local lovers’ lane at night and many things had been sealed there including a fair share of “doing the do,” you know hard and serious sex. During the day it was just a good place to catch a sea breeze and look for interesting clam shells which washed up in the swirling surf there.) Now not on his bike, without a helmet, and carrying books, books of all things, he looked like any student except maybe a little bolder and a little less reserved.

He started talking to Lily and something in his demeanor attracted her to him. (Clara swore, swore on seven bibles, that Lily was kind of stand-offish at first but Lily said no, said she was just blushing  a lot.) They talked for a while and then Bill asked Lily if she wanted a ride home. She hemmed and hawed but there was just something about him that spoke of mystery (who knows what Clara thought about what Lily thought about that idea). She agreed and they walked a couple of blocks to where he was parked. And there Lily saw that Vincent Black Lightning 1952 of her dreams. Without a word, without anything done by her except to tie her hair back and unbutton a couple of buttons from her starched white shirt she climbed on the back of the bike at Bill’s beckon. And that is how one Lily Dumont became William Kelly’s motorcycle “mama” when the high tide of the motorcycle as sex symbol hit our town.

Once Again, Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night

 

 

A YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.

 

By Josh Breslin

 

Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader of the crowd, our crowd of the class of 1964 guys who made it and graduated, not all did, a couple wound up serving time in various state pens but that is not the story I want to tell today except that those fallen brothers also imbibed Frankie’s wisdom (else why would they listen to him for they were tougher if not smarter than he was) about what was what in rock and roll music in the days when we had our feet firmly planted in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, had almost a sixth sense about what songs would and would not make it in the early 1960s night. Knew like the late Billy Bradley, my corner boy when my family lived on the other side of town back then, did in the 1950s elementary school night what would stir the girls enough to get them “going.” And if you don’t understand what “going” meant or what “going” and “rock and roll” together in the same sentence meant then perhaps you should move along. Why else would we listen to Frankie, including those penal tough guys, if it wasn’t to get into some girl’s pants. Otherwise guys like Johnny Blade (and you don’t need much imagination to know what kind of guy and what kind of weapon that moniker meant) and Hacksaw Jackson would have cut of his “fucking head’ (their exact expression and that is a direct quote so don’t censor me or give me the “what for”).

 

But that was then and this is now and old, now old genie Frankie had given up the swami business long ago for the allure of the law profession which he is even now as I write starting to turn over to his younger partners who are begging just like he did in his turn to show their stuff, to herald the new breeze that the austere law offices of one Francis Xavier Riley and Associates desperately needs to keep their clients happy. In that long meantime I have been the man who has kept the flame of the classic days of rock and roll burning. Especially over the past few years when I have through the miracles of the Internet been able between Amazon and YouTube to find a ton of the music, classics and one-shot wonders of our collective youths and comment on those finds from the distance of fifty or so years.

 

I have presented some reviews of that material, mostly the commercially compiled stuff that some astute record companies or their successors have put together to feed the nostalgia frenzy of the cash rich (relatively especially if they are not reduced to throwing their money at doctors and medicines which is cutting into a lot of what I am able to do), on the Rock and Roll Will Never Die blog that a guy named Wolfman Coyote had put together trying to reassemble the “youth nation” of the 1960s who lived and died for the music that was then a fresh breeze compared to the deathtrap World War II-drenched music our parents were trying to foist on us.        

 

That work, those short sketch commentaries, became the subject for conversation between Frankie and me when he started to let go of the law practice (now he is “of counsel” whatever that means except he get a nice cut of all the action that goes through the office without the frenzied work for the dollars) and we would meet every few weeks over at Jack’s in Cambridge where he now lives since the divorce from his third wife, Minnie. So below are some thoughts from the resurrection, Frankie’s term, for his putting his spin on “what was what” fifty or so years ago when even Johnny Blade and Hacksaw Jackson had sense enough to listen to his words if they wanted to get into some frill’s pants.

 

“Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these classic rock reviews. [This reference is what had been the sixth in the series that I had originally commented on but which Frankie felts he had to put his imprimatur on just like in the old days- JB] The part that starts out with a “tip of the hat” to the hard fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then the part that is befuddled by today’s teenage-hood. And then I go scampering back to my teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this review is no different, except, today we decipher the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses) that drive this one.

 

See, this series of reviews had been driven, almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs of this mammoth set of compilations (fifteen, count them, fifteen like there were fifteen times twenty or so songs on each compilation or over three hundred classic worth listening to today. Hell, even Frankie would balk at that possibility-we both agree something like fifty of them have withstood the test of time and that is giving guys like Gene Pitney with his Town Without Pity the best of it best mainly on melody not lyrics).

 

In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If you really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food, not as bad as at the drive-in movies but you expected that there, the theater owners knew every teenager was there for reasons other than nutrition and so could have foisted of paper cut-outs of food and we would have bought that, but bad, off a tray while seated in their cherry, “boss" 1959 Chevy.

 

And beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), and the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home after work a few cars over with some snarl on his face and daggers in his heart or maybe that poundage pounding you) there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where all of this gets mixed in.

 

Of course, just like another time when I was reviewing one of the CDs in this series, and discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” makes me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Yeah, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.

 

Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she enters, she always in the end enters into these things? Yes, I see that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie has really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation by Frankie on more than one occasion to no avail) he is nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not for his looks although they were kind of Steve McQueen okay. What they went for him for was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose (midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And not just “beat’ girls liked him, either as you will find out. Certainly Joanne, the rose of Tralee, was not a “beat” sister (although she was his first wife and beat him out his first serious bout of alimony and child support). 

 

Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the...(oh, forget it) Joanne had had their 207th (really that number, or close, since 8th grade) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)

 

Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (yeah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). Now this Arnie’s was a monument to the post-World War II values and while you may have an idea of what this drive-ins looked like if you had watched the 1973 film American Graffiti which was nothing but a paean to car culture in the Modesto night most of those scenes except they would have entailed ocean rather than valley life could have taken place in North Adamsville or a million other towns on a weekend night back in the day. So yes Arnie’s had the huge neon sign advertising his place which could be seen from miles around since it was on a hill and acted as a magnet for youth nation, circa 1960s, had the stalls reserved for “boss” cars (that extra perk brought forth by the hard fact that Red Radley the owner of the “bossest” ’57 Chevy and acknowledged king of the “chicken run” had been, ah, upset one night when he could not find a parking spot to highlight his beauty of a car and proceeded to wreck half of Arnie’s. He got the message, got it loud and clear), and had the menu in bright lights. He also had red vinyl booths inside for the “walkers,” those goofs without cars (and had picnic tables outside and in the back for summer use of those same goofs) since everybody cool or goof wanted to hug to the bright lights and possible action come weekend nights. 

 

That was the set-up we lived and died for and on an ordinary date-less Friday night that would have been a sad last call before an early night home. What I didn’t know that night was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was beyond belief enamored of his patter (or so I heard later when I grabbed the details and she actually confirmed that she thought Frankie was the smartest guy she knew, book smart wise, and maybe he was). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine.  Everybody admitted that Arnie’s had the best burgers in town especially if the late hour and maybe some lingering booze, drug, or sex overload made one hungry enough to eat anything placed before you but the other stuff was so-so and you were better off going to Jimmy Jake’s Diner over on Thornton Street if you really wanted to eat a  meal but which also meant that you had given up early on that lingering business mentioned above. But here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl). Part of the draw to Arnie’s was that the car hop uniforms were half-way to the whorehouse, or maybe better a burlesques show, what with the skimpy almost see-through blouses which showed in Sandy’s case her beautiful pointy proud bust, the very short, short pants that showed off her long well-turned legs and ankles, topped off by a rakish bellboy’s hat fixed at an angle. Her blue eyes and long reddish blonde hair and big ruby red lips completed the picture. Yeah, an A-one fox.   

 

The not so funny thing though was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.

Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I get a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).

Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor [Tonio’s Pizza Parlor of blessed memory-JB] and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it.

 

Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said she when he first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and like I said she said she had succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.

 

The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if any woman could rob the cradle according to Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and was just embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. This “aunt” business variously Aunt Emmy or Aunty Betsy usually lived in some place like Kansas or the Dakotas, you know out West so that the girl who was visiting auntie would have some reason to be away for several months and the farther away the mythical aunt lived the better. Get how I said mythical since the whole thing was eyewash as every twelve year old guy around our working class neighborhood and maybe every eleven year old girl knew once they started thinking about sex and what really happened if you were not careful-or did not abstain as the good parish priests tried to hammer home every freaking Sunday and other times too.

So the “visit” meant that some girl whether she wanted to or not let some guy go too far and all of us ignorant about sex and precautions knew she was in the “family way,” knocked-up, you know pregnant and was the reason they would have to go to the aunt’s. Sometimes not returning and sometimes going to auntie more than once. I would give a dollar to figure out how many girls were “away” at any given time but you know I, we, were mostly too interested in the girls who were around to worry about some bimbo who couldn’t keep her knees together (the way my father would express it about the “visit” when we kids got old enough not to have to listen to aunt silliness).

 

 

Moreover, and here is where the rubber hit the road as far as Frankie’s fate got twisted and turned around somewhere along the line Sandy, dish Sandy, lonely Sandy, and cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. (Frankie thought it might be about bringing shame on the Murphy family name, Joanne and Sandy’s last names but that seems too adult world dross although Joanne was a religious girl always even when she was secretly to the world giving Frankie whatever he wanted in the sex department outside of missionary intercourse so it could have had something to do with it.)  So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, was looking for a way to take revenge and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. And he was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles to secrecy. So I’m telling you this in strictest confidence even now fifty years later and long after his divorce from her, from the divine Joanne. Just don’t tell Joanne. Ever.

Of Angels And Things-With Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel (1960) In Mind

By Zack James

 

Fritz Taylor as he has grown older, has reached retirement age from his career as a professional printer having worked for newspapers and after that position went south along with the industry with the crush of the new digital technology as a main form of people getting their news then as the owner of a small specialty print shop that he is in the process of turning over to younger hands, has been increasing inclined to stray thoughts from seemingly out of nowhere. Recently he told his old friend Bart Webber over lunch and cocktails at Johnny’s Dinner in Gloversville the town where both had come of age as both had harkened back to on occasion just to thrash out old memories. He told Bart that he had been having a series of dreams about angels, although not in any context that one would expect from a guy who was getting closer to meeting his maker or whatever happens when he passes.            

No, emphatically no, old Fritz as he explained to a credulous Bart he was having neither one of those increasingly frequent “senior moments” nor was he reverting back to his youth when discussing what he now called the Tommy-rot that plagued his life. That Tommy-rot reference referring to the days before he got “religion” on religion and would take on all-comers on such Thomist scholastic subjects as how many angels could fit on the head of a needle. When he was a believer, a believer in the hard-core Roman Catholic version of religion the religion of his forbears as far back as anybody could remember, he would think nothing of wiling away the hours with anybody who wanted to discuss what was what about religion, about the “true” religion and eventually the question of angels would come up, especially the question of that vaporous guardian angel who every priest, nun, his mother, hell, the Pope in Rome told him was looking out for him. Then one day when he really was down on his luck, had made a series of disastrous decision when he could not hold his wanting habits in and was homeless and friendless and needed an angel in the worst way he got wise and finally figured out that he was on his own. After that the thrill of such argumentation abandoned him as well along with the thoughts of angels.  

No, Fritz was thinking of a different context, a different way in which angels came into play also in his youth. As one could have figured out indirectly since it was mentioned earlier that Fritz had come of retirement age so one could also figure out that he had come of age in the classic age of rock and roll and while there may have been a few guys around who loved their rock better Fritz held his own when it came to the songs that influenced his generation. So his series of dreams centered on his sitting fixed like glue in a booth in Doc’s Drugstore circa 1960 listening to something on Doc’s jack-up top end jukebox provided for the listening pleasure of the Gloversville High students who made the trek across the street from the school to listen and sip sodas and grab a snack. But here is the freaky part of the dreams every song that would come on that fabulous jukebox had something to do with angels-and no other songs would penetrate the airwaves. Fritz told Bart he took this for a sign, a sign of what he did not know.     

Those dreams when he awoke one morning after having a particularly vivid one got him thinking that there were in fact many angel-based songs back in the day. So he went onto YouTube typed in “angel” and came up with a zillion angel songs. Not all were from his time but enough were so that they brought back reminiscences of lost time.

Say a song like Earth Angel by the Penguins where the heavens, or heavenly angels take a back seat to the earthly delights, a song like Johnny Angel where some frill was crying for some loving from her Johnny boy who was out two-timing her, probably with her best friend, a song like Angel Eyes which is self-explanatory, or a song like Devil or Angel where the composer of the song forgot his or her basic John Milton Paradise Lost when we all knew that devils and devils’ kindred were all noting but fallen angels, those who took the wrong side in the big ass civil war in the heavens before the gates of Eden fell. Fritz said that he could have gone on but Bart who after all had been there sitting in real time alongside him most afternoons at Doc’s and so knew what Fritz was getting at  could figure out the rest for himself.

The one song Fritz couldn’t figure, one that kept recurring in several dreams was the eternal playing of Mark Dinning’s famous classic angel song, Teen Angel. Then he finally figured out what that damn song kept reoccurring. This was the one song that he and Seth Garth, yes, Seth Garth the well-known free-lance music critic for such publications as Rock, Folk Age and The Stone Today whom they had gone to school with had fought a battle royal over. See Seth had back then, back in 1960 when they were both just naïve and ignorant freshman, had  written a review of the song for Mimi Murphy, the editor of the school newspaper, The Magnet where he extolled the young girl in the song whose rash action would soon make her a teen angel as a model for the real girls of Gloversville. Undying devotion to her boyfriend after she had run back her boyfriend’s car which was stalled on the tracks and a railroad train was heading that way. Apparently the boyfriend narrator of the song had pulled her out when the car first got stuck and they were safe but somehow during the confusion she had left his class ring, a big deal then signifying “going steady,” signifying hands off and stuff like that, in the car. She ran back and you know the rest, or can figure it out.         

“Bullshit” said Fritz to Seth one Friday night in front of Vinny’s Sub Shop where they all hung out when they had no dough or no dates after he had read Seth’s article extolling this phantom angel. The frill was a cluck, a stupe, and about seven dizzy other things according to Fritz. Here is how the fight progressed at least from Fritz’s side since Seth as was his wont then, and now, would not budge on his take on the song. First of all Fritz said that the guy narrator’s car probably was some “shit-box” and the bimbo should have had had better sense than to hang with a guy who didn’t have a “boss” car, or had a car probably handed down from a hard-pressed father that couldn’t even maneuver a railroad track without causing mayhem. Next point, really the clincher, the guy probably had given that cheapjack class ring to every girl whom he tried to get into the pants of before teen angel’s time, used that token of teenage seriousness to get whatever he could from any bimbo who would fall for his two-bit charm. Worse, worse of all was that a freaking class ring was about one rung above giving a girl a cigar band, or maybe a twisted paper clip. Anybody who would even think of buying an overpriced nowhere class ring from Kay’s Jewelry which would tarnish about three days after you got it was, well, from nowhere. The guys around Vinny’s that night tended to line up with Fritz seeing the dizzy doll as just another hapless fool for love-and good riddance.    

The funny thing was that “controversy” would come up periodically the rest of freshman year, usually on those dough-less, date-less Friday nights until at some point all sides got tired of the thing and moved on to critiquing some other song. Funnier still was that fifty years later when Fritz Googled “teen angel” to look once more at the lyrics he knew in his heart that he had been right and all the old bile came to the surface. Maybe not world-historic right, but right. The frail was a cluck then, and now. Funniest of all though was the recent interest that Fritz had been taking old time folk ballads and religious hymns a number of them dangling angels around their lyrics. One in particular was drawing his attention, Angel Band. As he was getting closer to meeting his maker or whatever happened when he passed Fritz thought about one phrase in the last verse of that hymn-“I hear the noise of wings.” He wondered whether just before that end as the light faded he would hear that noise of wings. And too whether he would get the “skinny” from “teen angel” about her take on that rash move she made that fateful night.    

Of Governmental Obfuscation Back In The Day-Otto Preminger’s Film Adaptation Allen Drury’s Advise And  Consent (1960)

DVD Review

By Frank Jackman

 

Advise and Consent, starring Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, Don Murry, and an ensemble cast, directed by Otto Preminger, based on the novel by Allen   

 

For those who have forgotten or are too young to remember the seemingly endless obfuscations, bullyings, dirty tricks, ill-humored attacks and deep hubris of the Congressional set we are bombarded with these days is not of recent origin. Those of us who came of age, of political age in the time of the ill-fated Camelot of our youths know only too well the capacity of guys like one Lyndon Baines Johnson and one Richard Milhous Nixon, guys who for better or worse, mostly worse according to the historical record were actually Presidents of the United States their Congressional cronies (mostly Southern Democratic segregationists and red-neck rube Republicans from out in the heartland) to obfuscate, to bully, to do dirty tricks, to make ill-humored attacks and to act out of deep hubris. In some ways they would have had the current crop of Congress-people on their knees for lunch and had time for a nap. That brings us to this slice of life, this Congressional slice of life, particularly the Senate, film Advise and Consent from that ill-starred period based on the book by Allean Drury of the same name.     

Here’s how it played out then in the film and not too very far off in the normal course of governmental bickering then. The President, played by Franchot Tone, decided to nominate a long time governmental official, Leffingwell, played by Henry Fonda to be his Secretary of State. Such executive branch nominations under the separations of powers and check and balances reasoning behind the original constitution require the “advice and consent of the Senate to go through. That is the rub. Under ordinary circumstances such nominations are in the end whatever small hurdles are put before the nominees by the Presidents’ opponents or those who get a kick out of being contrarians are routinely processed. Not this nomination though.

Why? Well in those times mercifully past, mercifully passed maybe, the red scare Cold War night had the country in a deep freeze. Had average folk see reds under every bed, had every All-American kid putting the whammy on mommie the commie and that was on the rational days on the bad days they were ready to deep fry us with a quick nuclear strike just to keep us on our toes. The President’s nominee had been on the record as someone who was “soft on communism” maybe even a communist fellow-traveler or dupe himself.  That charge, or even the whiff of such accusations under ordinary circumstances then, who knows maybe now too although the red menace has been off the agenda for a while so I wonder where those “true believers” have been the last twenty-five years, would easily sink a nominee. And that was how it looked to one and all including the Majority leader of the Senate, played by Walter Pidgeon.

 

Despite Leffingwells’ lying, lying under oath, in other words he perjured himself, about his political past the President, ill and seemingly about to pass on, dug in his heels and against all conventional wisdom good judgment, and frighten fellow party officials  decided to push the nomination forward. That is where things get interesting from both the right, represented by Senator Cooley played by the old curmudgeon, a type long gone from the slick PR conscious politicos today, Charles Laughton who believed that Leffingwell was a sell-out, that he was in a word, a very strong political word at the time, now too an “appeaser” in the aftermath of the Munich capitulation by the West to Hitler just before World War II to the Russkies ready to blow us to smithereens. Strangely the right and left meet here in terms of sheer skullduggery since the leader of the “peace” faction used the dirty trick of exposing the homosexual past of a key Senator who was holding up bringing the Leffingwell nomination to a vote. Nasty stuff politics, the politics behind closed doors, the politics that makes the average citizen drossy and forgetful of the ballot box. Well the thing finally went to a vote by the films end. Guess what it ended in a tie. No nomination confirmed. No “advise and consent” pushed through. As for the why of why a tie meant no go in the constitutional process of the time watch the film. (Watch too the various historical anachronisms like the Vice President of the United States travelling on a commercial aircraft in what appeared to not even be first-class).