But first things first. The reason I’ve posted the accompanying vinyl album slick from a mid-‘Sixties release—Jason Odd, will you tell us exactly when?—is that Doc gave it to me just before its distribution in lieu of his signature, sort of. “This is for your scrapbook, son, since they never taught me to write,” is the way he put it.

Doc would stay at my house, and I would be his leadboy, whenever he came to LA. Leadboys are often followers (an interesting twist of the English language) of their blind musician-masters, as I was with Doc, and sometimes they even get to play and/or perform with their teachers, as was the case with Doc and me.

I backed up Doc on stage at the Ash Grove, LA’s leading folk and roots music venue from the late ‘Fifties into the ‘Seventies, and any other place he played when he was in Southern California, like Orange County College and various guitar workshops and symposia. So the album slick meant a little more to me than a big piece of coated, imprinted stock that identifying what was under it.

Back to business.

These days, Doc and his wife, Rosa Lee—the writer/composer of “Long Journey,” a track on “Raising Sand,” Robert Plante and Allison Krauss’ 2007 Grammy-winning album—are struggling with their health, Doc with urinary track issues and Rosa Lee with back and heart problems.

I mention this not only because it’s increasingly more and more of what we talk about, but because it’s the issue that led to our conversation suddenly deepening. Here’s how that went.

Doc had been going into some detail about a recent, intricate procedure Rosa Lee’d been thru involving the removal of a stroke-threatening blood clot in her brain resulting from a fall. The attending doctor at Wake Forest wasn’t sure about which course of action to take, but he eventually decided to drill a tiny hole in Rosa Lee’s head and remove the clot with suction. The procedure worked, and both the doctor and Doc felt the hand of “The Big Doctor” was on the hand of the medical one; the Big Heart, perhaps, had been in the chest of the musical one.

To Doc this was nothing but an affirmation of his deep belief in the healing powers of Jesus Christ, but not necessarily a belief he’d held all his life. I was curious about that, because I’d always assumed, based on long talks we’d had forty, forty-five years before, that he’d been a committed believer all his life.

I used the opening to ask him if he’d ever be interested in talking on the record about his spiritual life, something no one has covered in an interview so far. I quickly explained before he had a chance to say no that I thought he should think about it for three reasons: 1) it’s a huge part of his life—and music?—no one knows anything about; 2) it has had a sometimes profound effect on others (including myself); 3) it’s why he and his wife have a track on an Album of the Year. “Long Journey” is, after all, a religious song.

He thought for a minute, then said, “Al, I’d need to sit down and talk with you for about twenty minutes, and I mean not on the phone, but in person, before I’d want to answer that question.

Turns out he’d had a revelation about four years back that he feels changed his life, and he felt it would take a real sit-down, face-to-face to talk about it. I’m all ears, to say the least.

I’ve always listened carefully to Doc’s words on matters of the spirit. He’s a highly intelligent man with a basically scientific mind and a reasonably skeptical approach to things.

At the same time, he is a blind man, from deep, Southern poverty who has reached his 87th birthday in good shape, is still performing, and responsible for an approach to guitar playing that has had a deep and abiding effect on Folk, Roots & Rock music since he first appeared in public, in the early ‘60’s. Yes, Rock; v.q. Clarence White, Ry Cooder, et al. It’s hard to believe there isn’t something charmed about his life.

I’m gonna leave it at that, at least for now. More TK?

*                          *                           *                        *

From the book Growing Up Jewish in L.A.

NAME GAME

By Allan Ross

“Your father and I have decided to change our last name, sweetheart,” says the boy’s mother as she buttons his jacket and wipes a smudge of poached egg off his chin. She forces a smile and sounds apologetic. “It’s for business reasons.”

Her blond, shining-faced six-year-old son doesn’t react to the statement one way or the other, which is exactly what her husband, Jack, had predicted.

“We haven’t kept the Kashruth with him or observed the Torah,” Jack had said the night before, doing his best to keep the rancor out of his voice, if not his choice of words. “You wouldn’t send him to Hebrew School, you won’t let him fast with me on the High Holy Days. He knows nothing about being a Jew. Why should he care about having his name changed?”

Her husband’s point was well taken, but, still, she’d had her doubts. She’d long felt Jack saw their son’s feelings as much simpler and more predictable than they were. She wasn’t convinced he grasped the essentials of this situation in particular. It was uncomfortable for Jack, and he seemed to just want it behind them all as soon as humanly possible.

“Just tell him right out that we’ve already done it,” he’d said. “You’ll know whether it’s important to him or not the minute you tell him. And if it doesn’t seem important, I’d just as soon you leave it alone. There’s no reason to make more of it than necessary and worry an open sore.”

He was referring to the strain the name change had put on his and his wife’s relationship with his family, Old Country Jews who had lived through the worst of it and couldn’t understand trying to hide their identities now that the Nazis had been vanquished forever.

Eleanor’s youth had been hard and bitterly disappointing. The hardness was ten years in an orphanage, the disappointment the promises her aunts and uncles continually made and broke to get her and her three siblings out. It was a Jewish orphanage—with uniforms—and the time was the Depression. The experience left Eleanor resolved never to be poor again, and never, ever, to be seen first and only as a Jew.

She is forced to acknowledge that her son’s response to the news of the name change is indifference, and that her husband’s imprecation not to explain the decision any further, if this were the case, is wise.

And yet, even though it will make it easier for her to not have to answer any questions, she feels vaguely disappointed that Karl responded according to her husband’s expectations and not hers. Didn’t she and her son always think and feel alike? Isn’t that the unspoken agreement? Their bond?

“Someone at school’s going to ask you for a couple of things,” she says, handing him a manila envelope, “so they can make the changes in your records. It’s no big deal, darling, believe me. People do this all the time.” She tries to read his expression, but his face is the restless, ever-changing map of any six-year-old wondering what his fourth day in public school would bring.

“Come on, boychik,” she finally says, “what’s going on?” She pauses, just in case he tries to answer. But he doesn’t, so she does for him. “Why are we doing this, changing our name, right?” She thinks about her promise to her husband. But it’s just a question, she tells herself. It’s not spilt milk unless I answer it.

The boy nods.

“Well, if I tell you that ‘Rosenberg’ is too long and too hard to spell will you believe me?” She looks at him.

He makes a face and shrugs.

“That’s what I mean,” she mumbles to herself.

Eleanor had decided when Karl was born that there would continue to be a closeness between them equal to their bond before his birth. Her nine months carrying Karl had been the best ones of her life, even allowing for the discomfort. She had no intention of ending them just because he was out of her womb.

Her connection with Karl, the first thing in her life that had given her real happiness, would be built on a ferocious trust between them. Full disclosure, total honesty; no empty promises, no lies.

And, to a surprising extent, she’d managed to do away with many of the tall tales and postponed truths─—”bridge lies,” she called them──that parents in the Mid-Twentieth Century fed their pre-schoolers. But she’s noticed it was getting harder every day. She has trouble meeting Karl’s bright, exploring eyes.

He knows that this is somehow important to me, she thinks, but he can’t figure out how to get it out of me. Neither can I.

“But if I try to tell you the truth,” she says, finally looking straight at him, “I’ll have to use words and feelings you don’t know yet. I’m afraid you might think I’m some kind of …” She stalls and lapses into silence.

She can’t finish the sentence, not only because she doesn’t like what she’s going to say about herself, but because she realizes she has no idea what he’s going to think, or if he’s even going to think about it at all. He’s had no exposure to the culture, she hears her husband’s words from the night before. “It won’t mean anything at all to him.”

She tries on Jack’s words as a mantra, repeating them over and over to herself, trying to work them into some kind of rhythm. But it’s not a rhythm her heart understands.

I should live so long, she decides. How could it mean nothing to him when I can’t think about it without getting a lump in my throat?

“Mom,” the boy says, trying to get her attention. “Mom, listen: we’re going to make a wax tyrannosaurus rex, today. Neat, huh? See, first, we’re going to take this plaster mold thing…”

She hears not the words, just the sound of his voice. She kisses him on the cheek. “Yes, sweetheart, it’s neat.” Her hands flit over him, straightening and folding things that don’t need straightening and folding, her eyes once more avoiding his.

Her mind is on last night’s dishwashing conversation with Jack. The name change had become official that day, and he’d wanted as little marking of the occasion as possible. He was washing, she was drying when he’d asked her please not to explain anything to Karl unless an explanation was specifically asked for at the time she told him, i.e., right away. Jack knew how powerful were his wife’s [thought waves] over their son’s.

The brows above his blue-green eyes had arched hopefully as he’d handed her a hot, wet plate to dry. He was a spare, handsome man, patrician in body type and manner, patient and comfortable with his authority as operating partner of a small glazing concern. But his wife was his Achilles heel when it came to putting his foot down and keeping it there. He loved her madly, and had trouble bringing her any pain whatsoever, even when it was necessary.

Eleanor, silent for most of the conversation, had had no wish to give up an inch, an ounce, a nickel’s worth of the autonomy she’d consolidated as watchdog of her son’s happiness.

“It’s held so far,” she’d said to herself then, as she says to herself now, of her bond with Karl.

But she knows she’s on borrowed time, that the reason the bond has held this long is she’s let no one challenge it. Not her husband, nor his family, nor the school. To everyone’s amazement, she’d made a deal with the Los Angeles Tenth District Primary Education Department to allow her to home-school her son through his Kindergarten year, the last year of the War. It hadn’t been hard for her to get this dispensation. Eleanor was attractive, bright and resourceful. And highly motivated, when it came to Karl’s happiness.

“Eleanor?” her husband had said. “Promise? No discussion without a question?”

She’d nodded yes. Her reluctance was that Karl tended not to question anything she said, such was their agreement on full disclosure. He’d come to learn that whatever she wanted him to know, for example, how prehistoric animals had got to be trapped in the tar pits near their house, was front-loaded with all the information she had or wanted him to have. After that, she would become vague and distracted. Karl’d gotten used to not asking her to elaborate on things. And this worried her.

But she’d nodded, anyway. The fact of the name change was a huge victory, and she could concede this minor procedural point. Now, her son would not have to be a Jew first and everything else second.

“I promise,” she’d told her husband, knowing that by his lights, this was a valid oath and bond she would have to observe.

She suddenly realizes she’s been in a daydream for the last couple of minutes. She looks into Karl’s dark eyes, dancing with the imagined adventures he’ll have today outside the small, white, West Hollywood “Spanish-stucco” they’d moved into three weeks before.

“Karl, I…I promise I’ll explain it to you as soon as we have a long minute together.” It is the closest she’s ever come to saying, “You’ll understand when you get a little older,” and the sound of the words repulses her and makes her afraid for the bond. Please don’t press me, Karl, she prays silently.

“I bet I could understand it now,” says the boy. It’s his first full sentence since she had brought up the name thing.

Is that a question? she asks herself. But it’s too late, anyway, by the agreement she had with Jack. And, in fact, it really is too late to go into it now. His ride is due any minute.

“I bet you could, too, darling. It’s just that the car is going to be here any second, and we always try to finish what we start, don’t we?”

The boy nods and runs to the window. The thrill of the anticipated ride causes him to burst into one of his “sunshine smiles,” as Eleanor and Jack call them, big, happy, bet-the-limit toothers that can drench a room with dazzling light when he flashes one. Its pure Sunkist brightness and energy leaves her momentarily stunned with joy as she watches him separate the blinds and search for today’s carpool car.

She remembers the first time she ever imagined having a child with Jack, long before he’d proposed. It was an entirely different feeling than she’d ever had before, warm, personal and private. And surprisingly proprietary. Here was a young woman who’d never had a puppy, and now she was picturing herself with a child! And it felt fine, thank you, just fine.

As she came to live with the growing possibility, she began to think about the life this child would have, and what she could do to make it the best it could be. The first thing she could do would be to subtract anything that could describe her life between the ages of eight and eighteen. Automatic identification as Jewish was out.

She’d told her husband before they were married that his family name might be an issue some day. He’d replied they would deal with it then, and nothing more was said for the next seven years. But “then” had finally come, forcing her to excercize her option. It was not going well.

The Petition for Change of Name had threatened the uneasy equilibrium between her and her husband’s family like nothing else in their marriage before, and she’d only won this victory because of the sudden crackdown on “subversives” in the motion picture industry.

She’d been a negative-cutter and bloop mark-maker at Pathé Labs before the War. Bloop marks are the hand-applied ink blots that appear toward the end of a film reel to alert the projectionist to start the next reel, so the change will appear seamless. She knew several of the men who were being blacklisted as Communist sympathizers by the newly-formed House UnAmerican Activities Commission. She also knew that all but one were Jewish.

“It’s very involved, darling,” she tells her son, who’s no longer listening, “and you’re going to miss your ride if I try to explain it now.”

As if to underscore her special powers as the boy’s omniscient guardian-spirit, there are five short burps of a car horn from the street.

“There’s Mrs. Van Kirken,” she says. “Big kiss, now, my pony-boy.”

The boy had run to the front door and now must come back to deal with the new demand. She meets him halfway across the living room, he kisses her quickly on the lips, then runs out of the house waving and yelling all the way to the car. She waves to Mrs. Van Kirken herself and watches from the doorway as the ‘39 Buick roars up to the corner, turns right and disappears up Almond Avenue.

She stands in the threshold of the door for a full minute after that, thinking about their new lives in this homey, middle class neighborhood and wondering if it will be the positive, liberating journey her husband had confidently prophesied, or the same old song and dance she’d always known, feeling that she had to read every new face for signs of acceptance or rejection, study every gesture her new neighbors made, every expression, vocal inflection, throat-clearing to see if she were on safe ground with them or not. She cannot remember a moment in her life when she had not noticed herself noticing herself. She wonders if her son will notice the difference between being Karl Rosenberg and Karl Roberts.

* * *

“I don’t know if I get it,” says Mrs. Johnson, Karl’s first grade teacher, as she fingers the paperwork he’d left on her desk earlier that morning.

He stands facing her across her big teachers’ desk in the rear of the classroom, where she can watch everyone at their desks from behind. The rest of the class has been told to study.

“I mean,” she says to Karl, just a little too loudly to be meant for his ears only, “I don’t know which name you’re changing. Are you Robert Rosenberg now?”

The room stirs with a random energy that hadn’t been noticeable a few seconds before.

Karl shakes his head slowly, not sure he’s hearing right. He’d forgotten about the name change. He’d put off thinking about it from minute to minute, then forgotten about it completely. Even now, with Mrs. Johnson sitting here talking to him about it, it seems to have no place in his life. But he knows he’s not Robert Rosenberg.

“No, it’s─—” he says, but it’s too late.

“So, you’re still Karl Rosenberg. Do you have a brother?”

“No, ma’am.” He realizes he’s got to catch up to her, to where she’s going with this. “It’s my last name that’s changed, Mrs. Johnson. I mean, it’s being changed. To Roberts. My name’s going to be—um, is──Karl Roberts…I guess.”

The air over his classmates’ heads is alive with schoolroom outlaw energy. No one works, everyone is listening.

He realizes it’s the first time anyone has actually pronounced his new name. He is embarrassed. He doesn’t know why, but there’s something vaguely sinister about suddenly being someone else, just like that. No wonder the teacher seems a little put out. I’m getting away with something, he tells himself.

He wishes he’d spent some time thinking about his new name before having to explain it to someone else, in front of his friends and everything. He wishes Mrs. Johnson could have been a little more quiet, or nicer about it, or something. It’s like I did something wrong, and I’m supposed to feel ashamed. And I do feel ashamed.

He wonders why his mother didn’t tell him that there might be… something? He feels a pang of terror at…what? Her fallibility? A betrayal? But that could never be. Something’s wrong and he feels alone, exposed and helpless.

“Fwoof!,” says Mrs. Johnson, sounding weary and unconvinced. “Okay, ‘Karl…Roberts,’” she says, laboring over the name and looking back and forth from him to the Change of Name certificate, as if no matter how hard she tried, she could not make them fit together.

“I’ll, uh, make sure this goes to the Attendance Office. You can return to your seat, Karl.”

Karl nods, mumbles a “thank you” to her and slinks away from her desk toward his own. He is half-way there when he hears her voice again, this time at its full classroom-teaching volume.

“Class?”

There’s no rustle of bodies turning to look at her, because they’re already turned in that direction; have been, for the last few minutes.

But Karl turns. Does he ever. And realizes in a frozen split-second what Mrs. Johnson is about to do.

“Class,” she says, “Karl Rosenberg’s family has changed their last name. It’s now Roberts. So Karl Rosenberg is now Karl Roberts. Can we all say, ‘Karl Roberts?’”

“Kar-l Rob-berts,” echoes the class.

“Very good,” says Mrs. J. to the class. “This is one of the wonderful things about living in America,” she goes on, improvising, “that foreigners can come here and change their names whenever they want. Can anyone tell me a place in Europe or the Orient where you are allowed to do that?” [Pause]. “Anyone?” [Pause]. “I didn’t think so. Can we all say, ‘Europe and the Orient?’”

“‘Yur-rup and the Or-ient,’” repeats the class.

“Good. And, again, class: ‘Karl Roberts?’” says Mrs. Johnson.

Karl begins to redden.

“Kar-l Rob-berts,” mumbles the class. They are looking at him as if he were on the other side of bars in a zoo. How could she not have told me?

The loneliness deepens, begins to feel willed and personal, like rejection, as if his classmates had voted, right out in front of him, to blackball him from their company. He searches for a familiar emotion, anything to give the chilly experience a handle.

The birthday party! he thinks. The birthday party with the sign they stuck on my back!

He’d gone to a birthday party for an older child, the daughter of friends of his parents, where somebody had stuck a sign on his back with Scotch tape that said, “Hit Me Hard, Please!”

The kids at the party had socked him forever, on his arms, chest, stomach, wherever they could get a clear shot as he spun in circles trying to find out what he’d done to start it so he could stop it. But wherever he turned for help there was nothing but laughter and more punching and shoving. There was some kind of code to which he did not have the key.

Finally, a fourth grader hit him in the nose and he started bleeding. At first he was too stunned to cry. But in a few seconds he felt a tightness behind his eyes and a raw catch at the bottom of his throat that he knew he couldn’t give in to but couldn’t seem to stop, either.

Then one of the parents came back into the room, sized up the situation, scolded the ringleaders and showed Karl the sign.

That had ended it for the parent, but Karl continued hurt and confused by it. Although the parent told him it was “a stupid kids’ game, for stupid kids,” and not to take it personally, somehow he did take it personally. After all, the sign was taped to his back, not the parent’s or anyone else’s.

This feels like that, he decides, looking at the classroom faces looking at him. Except that the sign gag had finally ended. This one seemed to keep going on and on, courtesy of Mrs. Johnson.

“And one more time, class: ‘Karl Rosenberg is Karl Roberts.’”

And, unlike the message taped to his back, this one is published out there in the ether, in code, and everyone in the classroom knows the code except him. And he’s not going to learn it here, either, because it’s something you’re supposed to already know.

“Kar-l Rose-n-berg is Kar-l Rob-berts.”

He pictures the pretty and adoring face of his mother, leaning over him or kneeling in front of him while he stands, so they’re both eye-to-eye, but he cannot ever remember her telling him anything about name-changing except what she’d said this morning. He doesn’t know the word “betrayal” yet, but he knows his throat aches and his eyes are filling with tears, eroding his fragile composure.

He prays Mrs. Johnson has finished with him, and that she’ll give an assignment or something to the class that will end this difficult moment, not just for him but for everyone.

But she seems to have become involved with something on her desk and leaves him dangling at the end of an imaginary string with which she controls the length of the moment.

He makes it back to his desk and sits down quickly. A couple of rows away two boys whisper to each other and steal glances at him. They’re laughing at something. What is it? he wants to yell. Why are you laughing? Why are you all staring at me?

The words reverberate silently in his head. But something tells him that to utter them aloud would be to break another code he doesn’t have the key to, just like the one about name-changing, so he doesn’t make a sound.

And still there is no break in the freefall the teacher has put the class in as she rearranges the top of her big oak desk. Karl has heard his parents say they were “waiting for the other shoe to drop” about something in the future that made them nervous, and that’s the way he feels right now.

The mood in the classroom has become edgy, bordering on hostile. The two boys in the first row are now staring at him all the time and sharing some “goods” they seem to have on him with each other. Now another boy joins them and starts looking at Karl as if he’s just learned something that changes everything he might have ever thought about him.

In desperation Karl reaches under his desk and picks up the first thing his hand touches. It’s an arithmetic book, but it doesn’t matter; he’ll take anything that allows him to avert his eyes from the mobs’. He tears into the book as if it were directions to buried treasure.

It’s a chance gesture, not intended to have any effect on anyone except himself, but for some reason it breaks Mrs. Johnson’s de facto spell over the class. After a minute or two of watching Karl read they begin to lose interest. Some even look at the clock. Mrs. Johnson feels her own loss of control.

“All right, class,” she says at last, putting the final touches on her finally-efficient desktop. “Let’s have a rest period before lunch. Heads down, everybody. You, too, Karl. You can’t be special all the time.”

The moment is over, and not a second too soon. His aching throat and quivering lips couldn’t have survived another “Kar-l Rob-berts,” or another smirk or, for that matter, even an honestly curious glance without betraying him and costing him the battle right there.

Why did I know to call it a battle? he asks himself. It is a parenthetical question, and he is curious to know how it got there. Do I know things I don’t think I know?

But he has not learned why a battle started in the first place. He hasn’t decrypted any codes. How could he? His mother hadn’t given him any keys; his beautiful, adoring, perfect and invincible mother, with whom he is one.

Karl Roberts, neé Rosenberg, puts his head down on his desk. He wonders if anyone else can see the lump in his throat. Just in case they can, he makes sure he is the last one to leave the room for lunch period.

* * *

“…Seven, eight!” cry the three six-year-old girls playing hop-scotch in front of him.

Today, he’s decided to eat in the play area rather than the lunchroom. At first he has the bench and the whole corner of the gravel upper-yard to himself. But after twenty minutes kids begin to drain out of the lunchroom and into the upper and lower play areas. Court and game boundary lines have been marked with powdered lime on the uneven gravel surface of the upper field. It’s Monday, so the lines are still crisp and fresh. By this time the next day they’ll be nothing more than white smudges in the light brown pulverized granite.

“Karl,” yells one of the kids he’s been getting to know, “we’re gonna play dodge-ball. Come on.”

Karl looks around himself for a few seconds before he realizes Dennis Mueller is talking to him. He feels a rush of joy to be included, but he isn’t ready to leave his private island.

“I have to eat my lunch,” he yells back. “I’ll come down as soon as I──”

But Dennis has already moved on to a clutch of other kids walking out of the lunchroom. He quickly recruits some of them. Now, Karl feels left out. Nuts, he thinks, shoulda gone.

He’s still not comfortable at West Hollywood Elementary. It’s only his second week there and almost all the other kids know each other from before and from outside of school. His mother says it will just take a little time for him to become “one of the guys,” but one day, soon, he’ll look around and there it’ll be: recognition and acceptance.

I guess not today, he says to himself as he empties his lunchbox garbage into a pail at the end of his bench.

Two of the boys who hadn’t gone with Dennis to play dodge-ball have sat down on the bench that makes a right angle with Karl’s. They’re the same two who were whispering and laughing at him in class. They’re playing with some pieces of metal Karl recognizes as empty shell casings. Lots of kids have them. It’s only a year after the War.

Occasionally, either one of the boys looks over at him. Karl nods to them. They start giggling and their conversation gets more animated. They continue stealing glances at him until one of them seems to have an idea. They have a quick discussion and then get up and walk over to Karl. The big one, whose name is “JJ” Something, is blond and freckled and sheathed in baby fat.

“See this?” he asks Karl, standing over him and holding out a large brass cylinder closed on one end and tapering at the other. “Know what it is?”

“Um, a bullet shell?” asks Karl.

JJ turns to the other boy, Ronnie, and they both snicker. “‘A bullet shell,’” says JJ. Both boys roll their eyes skyward, shake their heads.

“This is a real Sturmgewehr 44 shell casing,” says JJ. “I have the load and the cap at home. They won’t let me bring it to school.”

Donnie’s nod punctuates the statement.

“Wow,” says Karl. It seems like the right thing to say.

“My dad brought it back from Germany,” JJ says. He reaches into his Levis, struggling to get his hand into a front pocket made tight by his girth, and pulls out another shell. “He got this one in Salerno. I’ve got a whole bunch of them at home. I’ve got a live hand grenade, too. My dad has a Mauser pistol. Where did your father fight?”

Karl is caught off guard by the question. He looks at Donnie, who looks back at him with narrowed eyes and unmoving lips, like a Hollywood gangster.

“I-I don’t know,” he says, at last. “I’ll have to ask him.”

The two other boys exchange looks and snickers. JJ says, “I bet you don’t get an answer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think your father fought in the War.”

Karl frowns. “How do you know?” he says, although it’s true his father hadn’t fought in the Second World War.

Jack had volunteered but was rejected for flat feet and bad eyesight. He’d gone to another draft board, a hundred miles away, in Bakersfield. But there, besides the feet and eyesight, they found a spot on his lung and sent him packing. He’d really wanted to fight, in either theatre, though he’d have preferred the European. This War was very personal to him.

“We just know,” says Donnie, speaking for the first time.

“How?” insists Karl.

The two boys look at each other. “My father told me,” says JJ.

“Told you what?”

“That your father didn’t fight in the War.”

“Maybe he couldn’t, or something,” says Karl.

The two boys exchange smiles and huffs.

“Why couldn’t he?” says JJ.

“I don’t know. Maybe he was sick. I think that’s what it was.”

“Maybe he was chicken,” says Donnie, and now Karl’s suspicions are confirmed: calling his father a coward was what this whole conversation had been about from the beginning. He doesn’t know where the next words come from, but they come.

“Oh, yeah?” he says.

“Maybe,” says Donnie.

“Who says?” says Karl. He starts to stand up, but JJ pushes him back down.

“Everybody says,” says JJ. “Jews don’t like to fight. That’s why you changed your name. So you wouldn’t have to fight.”

Karl tries to get up again, but Donnie shoves him back down. He sits there for a moment, confused, except about one thing: the other shoe has dropped, the code has been broken. It’s about being Jewish. And yet it’s far from clear to Karl why that fact is the source of his current trouble. He is blond, six years old, lives on Rosedale Avenue and the family owns a 1938 DeSoto, but no one is pushing him around because of those things.

Why are people picking on me? Is there something wrong about being Jewish? Can you get in trouble for it? Can you change it if you want? Is that why we’re changing our name?

He is talking to himself, but it’s his mother’s beautiful, devoted and, now, sad face he sees in his mind, and she is silent. His own inner voice, directed to the unseeing figure, sounds confused and anxious.

Mom, I don’t know what to do.

The two boys seem to talk to each other with their eyes. Then JJ suddenly pushes Donnie into Karl, and the two go flying over the bench, Donnie ending up on top of Karl.

“Oops, so sorry,” says JJ, reaching across the bench to offer one of them help. It turns out to be Karl.

Karl looks at the extended hand for a moment, then shakes it off, knowing at that moment that it’s the next step along a road he’s never been down before. I don’t want this, he starts to whimper to himself.

JJ’s hand is still out. There’s a smirk on his face. “I want us to be friends, Karl,” he’s saying. “C’mon, shake.”

“Yeah, me too,” says Donnie, shooting his hand out as he gets back to his feet.

Two or three kibitzers that had been watching the three boys now becomes a dozen souls and continues to grow. Karl recognizes faces. Robin Malone, Chris MacKeown. It seems as if his whole class is gradually joining the ring forming around him and the other boys.

I don’t want to be here. Mom!? Where are you? What am I supposed to do?

“Um, I, uh…,” he says, on his feet but rejecting the hands offered in supposed friendship, “I really have to─—”

“What’s the matter,” JJ says, “you don’t want to touch us?” He looks from his open hand to Karl, and then to the crowd. “Did Mommy tell you not to play with anyone who wasn’t your own kind?”

Karl has been examining the scrape on the heel of his hand where he’d broken his fall a few moments before when he hears these words. He looks up from the reddening wound at JJ. His eyebrows are knit in uncertainty.

My “own kind?” he says to himself. I have a “kind?” What is it? He’s looking at the inside-tipster expression JJ wears for the crowd and wonders who else knows what his, Karl’s, “own kind” is. He pictures his mother’s face once more, but in the imagined dialog he can tell she doesn’t see him.

Mommy, what are they talking about? How come everybody knows except me?

Her smile in this imagined audience is sad and embarrassed. She looks defeated to Karl, like pictures of prisoners of war he’s seen in the newsreel. Her image, which had been vibrant and almost real to him in this and all his psychic exchanges with her, has grown pale and unconvincing, and her voice is thin and hollow, whistling and tubular. It makes him uncomfortable to think he’s been relying on her as heavily as he has.

“Because I didn’t tell you, my sweetheart, my darling, that’s why. I didn’t know how. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” And then her image is gone.

Karl experiences a deep shudder of isolation. He knows he’s about to go through something important for the first time in his life without having his mother less than four rooms away. No strong hand to hold when the wave crashes over him, no comforting voice to still his father’s scary one on the rare occasions when he used it.

“C’mon, Karl, you know what I’m talking about,” says JJ. “Changing your name doesn’t change what you are.”

Karl looks around at the expectant crowd, hoping for some sign of what is expected of him. But there is none. In desperation he says the first thing that comes into his mind.

“I never said it did.”

“Good,” says JJ, still playing to the crowd, “then let’s shake on it.” His hand is still out, re-offering peace.

But Karl shakes his head, No.

“Why not?” says JJ, stabbing his hand further into Karl’s personal space, which Karl reckons to be about one arm’s-length away from his belt buckle or his nose.

“I don’t have to have a reason,” says Karl. He is surprised at the words, at their simple honesty, and how they sound coming out of his mouth. They sound like him.

“My friends and I aren’t good enough for you? Huh?”

Karl stares silently at his tormentor.

“Well,” says JJ to his partner and the crowd, “I guess we’re just not good enough for Karl Robsonbergerrosen──”

“Hey,” says Karl. “Hey! Don’t say that!” Is this me? It can’t be; I don’t know how to do this.

JJ stops and glares at Karl. “Did I say it wrong? Robertbergrosen? No, wait a second: Boogerbergerrosen──”

JJ gets another one or two wheezy syllables out before Karl slams into his chest, knocks the wind out of him, sends them both to the ground with the skidding, scratching sound of bodies hitting pea gravel in earnest. It’s so fast and unexpected no one seems to even see it. And least of all, Karl, whose face is buried in JJ’s chest as the two roll on the ground, piston-punching each other with every fiber of their little six-year-old beings.

There is something about a schoolyard fight that can galvanize kids into action faster than a gym teacher with a paddle. From the ground Karl sees knees and shoes and Levis and socks converge around him and JJ as if by magic, as if the disembodied limbs and ankles, oxfords and Mary Janes were told to “make a ring around these two fellows, won’t you?” He also realizes, with a welter of mostly negative emotions that it is he who has “started” the first fist fight of the new school year.

The two six-year-olds roll around on the loose, rough surface, grunting and puffing. At a distance it could be two kids playing any game. But about this particular contest there is an air of duty and of things at stake, though neither boy could tell you what they were.

The crowd is now four or five deep, the yelling and screaming is spirited.

“Fight! Fight!” yell the first, second and third grade boys.

“Eeeee!” scream the first, second and third grade girls.

“JJ! Get him in a headlock!” says a brown-haired boy with a butch and a thick green rubber band of mucous hanging out of his nose.

“Whatsa matter, JJ, did he hit back?” says another boy, taller, a little more worldly, probably a third grader.

As the two boys come out of a roll, straining and gasping for breath, it is Karl who is on top. JJ’s bigger, but Karl’s gotten hold of his right arm and bent it behind him in such a way that JJ is helpless and in pain. The half-Nelson wrestling hold is a complete accident on Karl’s part. He couldn’t recreate it if he had to. But he knows enough to hold on.

JJ tries to stand up and turn in the direction of the corkscrewing motion, but Karl keeps the tension on, following JJ around the improvised ring and twisting his arm counterclockwise. JJ is forced to his knees, his face almost in the dirt as Karl continues to torque the taut helix of his arm.

“Karl, wait,” gasps JJ, looking up at the smaller boy. “Can’t we just be friends? I was kidding about that other stuff. I just want us to be friends.” His voice sounds different than it had just a moment earlier saying almost exactly the same words. He sounds strangled, breathless and very much the little boy he is.

Karl eases the pressure on JJ’s arm a sixteenth of a turn or so, leans over him for a muffled conversation. JJ shakes his head reluctantly up and down. His face is beet-red and he is sweating. Karl straightens up.

“Okay?” he says in a hoarse whisper to JJ. “Okay?!” more urgently this time, and giving the arm a half-inch tweak.

“Aarrgh!” cries JJ, “Yes, yes. Okay. Yes. I promise. Yes.”

“Say it!” It’s Karl, near tears, still not knowing where to take this, how to finish it, what to do now.

“I promise not to make fun of Karl Roberts’ name anymore,” JJ says, panting. “I promise swear to God.” His head is still just an inch or two from the ground.

Karl can’t think of anything else to do, so he lets go of JJ’s arm.

At the same time, he feels the collar of his sweater snap into a garrote round his neck, tighter and steadier than any first, second or third grade hand could make it.

As his breath catches in his throat he sees a second hand, partner to the first, grab a big shock of JJ’s hair, pull it up off the ground, head and all, and turn it to face him. It happens so quickly and Karl is so wound up by the high-octane mixture of emotions pulsing through him it takes him a second to realize that both hands belong to Mr. Palmister, Principal of West Hollywood Elementary School.

“I think you fellows are about through, aren’t you?” says the Mr. Palmister, looking from one to the other.

They look at each other, at the ground, mumble their “Yessirs” to him.

“Good. First, you’ll tell me what your names are, and then you’ll follow me to my office.” He looks at JJ.

“John Joseph Corman, sir,” says JJ.

Then he looks at Karl.

“Karl, uh, Roberts, sir,” says Karl.

“Are you sure, Karl ‘Uh’ Roberts?” says the Principal.

“Yessir,” Karl says, nodding. “I’m sure, sir. Karl Roberts.”

3/30/02 6665 wds.

© Allan Ross, Waccabuc, 2002

I want to at least start a post on the late Bob   “the Bear” Hite,  mover and shaker —— especially  shaker——with my all-time favorite blues band, Canned Heat, since Feb. 26 is his birthday, and this is Feb. 26. But it is also the eye of one of the great mid-Atlantic snowstorms of recent times in which this being written, and I’m about to lose power. In fract, the lights just flickered, and I don’t wnat to lose anything, so I’m going to post this now and come back to it. At least I will have made the deadline.

View from my window right now

Bob and Canned Heat were very kind to my band, Evergreen Blueshoes. They turned us on to the Topanga Corral,  an important venue in their early days, and turned the owners of the Corral onto us.  The Corral WAS our early venue for many months, and really has to be considered our launching pad.

I knew Bob via Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento,  as a blues collector, well before he co-formed the Heat with Al “Blind Owl” Wilson, another blues scholar and fellow student in UCLA’s Anglo-America Folklore and Folkmusic Dept. or whatever it was called, in the mid-’Sixties. Yes, Al, Barry, John Fahey  and I were certainly interested in the genres, but we were absolutely FASCINATED with staying out of Nam, and the Folklore and Folkmusic graduate program gave us IIs student deferments to do just that, don’t ask me why.

Anyway, Bob and the Heat gave us our start in a way, and I will love his memory forever.  He had a terrific sense of humor, and an even better sense of irony.

One of the many times they got busted for drugs–a drama which they seemed to revel in–they were thrown into some cell in LA, I have no idea which one,  made their call, and began the short wait for their attorney to come and get them out. But I guess he couldn’t get there fast enough for them to get high again,  so Bob developed a headache, asked for some aspirin, ground it up, put it in cigarette and passed it around.

“What the fuh!” was almost all I could say when he told me.  “Why?” was the rest of it.

“Well, it was  better than nothing, wasn’t it?” he said. You can’t argue with that.

He was a classy guy,  a good blues collector, and a thunderous presence on stage.  Say what you want about the importance of blues guitarist/singer Al Wilson and rock  guitarist Henry Vestine (btw, both gone, as is Bob) when I think of  “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ , hearing it on the radio and seeing it performed live, I think of Bob Hite. In my knowledgeable and arrogant opinion, he was the heart of the band.

And it looks like I got my 2 cents worth said before the next wave of this storm hits.

*                       *                   *

Here’s an historical event I’ve been trying to write up for 20 years or more with no success, and I don’t think I’ve broken that run now. But I just have to get this on the record, and I can’t wait until it’s ready to come out of me in its own good time.   It’s really kind of cool, and I hope you read it.

*                                  *                               *

How the Cossacks Took Their Vodka

by Allan Ross

This is one of very few personally-related, historically interesting stories I collected from my family, and I think it needs to be recorded. Though it’s now almost two centuries since the event took place, it still lives in my family’s generational memory, even if the generation is represented by only me, as personal experience. It’s what I call “touching the hem of the hem” history.

As usual with ancient, oral accounts, accuracy is not the point. The “facts” were presented to me as facts.

The story was told to me on a hot, blast-oven-dry Los Angeles summer afternoon when I was home on semester break from college, my parents were in Las Vegas and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my grandfather, Papa Dave, drinking bourbon in shots and listening to stories from his childhood. This is one of them.

*                          *                    *

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in rural peasant Russia, vodka was bottled by filling an open flask with liquor, then blowing the top closed so that the vessel was completely sealed. (Remember what I said about oral recollection vs. facts).

Papa Dave guessed it saved a few steps in the bottling process, but it meant you had to break off the top of the bottle to get to the vodka. You would then spill a little of it onto the ground to rinse away any shards on the jagged edge, pour yourself and your friend a glass, say “Na Sdrovye,” and—down the hatch. Except for the Cossacks.

The Cossacks would drink straight from the bottle, passing it to each other and getting drunker and drunker as the booze made it’s from horseman to horseman, first mingling with, then joining their body fluids with its own. Bottles would replace themselves as soon as they were empty.

In the early rounds, while the Cossacks were still sober, they would hold the shattered mouths of the bottles above their open maws, goatskin-like, and let the liquor pour out and down their throats.

But sometimes, after drinking this way for awhile, anesthetized and growing clumsy, they would begin stabbing away at their lips and faces with broken bottlenecks until blood ran down their cheeks and necks, onto their tunics, down their arms, where they drew veins on the backs of their hands and onto the white snow.

When they got drunk enough they’d decide what they were going to do to whatever peasants were unlucky enough to be around at the moment. The sight of bloody-faced, rifle-waving Cossack horsemen was something no Russian peasant could ever forget. The Cossacks, for their part, seemed to live for these moments.

Their standard procedure was to descend, eight or ten strong, on a settlement, rein in their huge, steaming horses just outside some family’s hovel, smash the first bottle across a fence post or porch rail or anything else solid enough to withstand one blow from a blown vessel, and begin passing it around while the locals cringed in barn, house, or wherever they were huddled, in unspeakable fear, because they never knew what the Cossacks would do once they were drunk. Usually, neither did the Cossacks.

This time, though, in my grandfather’s story, the Cossacks had a purpose: it was to savage an enemy’s army as it retreated across the frozen Steppes after losing a battle at the gates of Moscow during a typically bad Russian winter in the early 1800’s. It was a desperate chase where the once great army could not stop long enough to bury its dead. The best its recoiling troops could do was kill their dying before the Cossacks did, in a way far worse than a lead ball through the head. The survivors would then continue back-pedaling, begging potatoes or bones or a nite of shelter along the way to safety from quaking serfs who usually stared at them thru panic-blinded eyes and did nothing.

However, in my grandfather’s story a peasant family does the unthinkable: with the Cossacks one town away and closing hard, they succor two infantrymen for a night and a day, hiding and feeding them and finding enough rags and leather scraps to make them footwear that had a chance of holding up for the frigid, problematic journey home.

There was nothing special about the two soldiers; probably a couple of poor farm boys from some rural area in their own country who’d joined the army hoping they might get dealt a better hand in life soldiering than plowing. In some ways they were not that different from the peasant family quartering them, risking all to give them an advantage maybe ten, fifteen kilometers on the Cossacks. And maybe that’s why they did it: they saw themselves in the two soldiers. There is simply no way to ever know.

Anyway, in my grandfather’s story, they somehow get away with it, the French foot-soldiers and Russian peasants, with the Cossacks less than half a day’s ride behind the two boys. As far as the family knew, the boys made it back to France.

*                          *                          *

What makes this story light up in neon for me is that the story was told, as you’ve probably figured out by now, to my grandfather by his grandmother who’d been one of several daughters in the family that took in the soldiers. The soldiers were part of Napoleon’s troops that limped back to France after their defeat in Moscow in 1812.

I do not know her name, and I doubt if I ever will, but my great, great grandmother actually saw and remembered the Cossack horsemen, their vodka turned red from their own blood, their yellow eyes narrowing as they pranced their horses thru her shtetl, probably trying to decide what hovels to fire, who to rape, who to kill, you know, the usual. And when my grandfather was old enough my great-great grandmother told him. I guess he figured at 18 I was old enough for him to tell me.

No wonder I was, and still am, a little bit excited. That story really was about the Napoleonic wars, the beginning of the end of the Empire, and that really was my great-great grandmother telling my grandfather all about it, up close and personal. And that really was my grandfather telling me the story of how our—my!—family hid Frenchmen from the Cossacks, and how the Cossacks took their vodka.

So it’s my story now, and can you imagine telling it in a fraternity bull session after someone else is finished talking about how his dad ran out of gas on the Oakland Bay Bridge? Well, I did and it got me an extra dessert.

¬

Photo and research courtesy of Jason Odd

I just received a late Christmas present from my two sons: a 1969 Harry Belafonte album, By Request (RCA LSP-4301), on which trax I played guitar. My sons’ timing was great: Harry’s birthday is next Monday, March 1. He will be 83.

Altho’ Harry himself has hardly been central in my life, he’s touched it in one way or another for more than fifty years.

I ushered at one of his annual appearances at the Greek Theatre in Hollywood while I was still going to Fairfax High, so it must have been either 1958 or ’59. His was also the music that first turned me on to something besides Rock n’ Roll; and then there was this here album, produced by Jack Pleis and Andy Wiswell and recorded at RCA Studios on, I think, Sunset Blvd. in LA (Jason Odd, you can correct me on this if I am wrong) on August 18 and 19, 1969.

(BTW, looking in my daybook for those recording dates I see I did something for Sam Russell and Irv Hunt on the afternoon of Aug. 19 at Sun West—and that studio, I’m sure, was on Sunset Blvd. I don‘t know what I was doing there for Sam and Irv; they were, they said, producing Little Richard at the time, but I was also high at the time, so don’t ask me what was going on. Jason, any ideas?)

Anyway, playing on the BY REQUEST album did become a pivotal event in my life, because the other guys on the dates were his regular band, and they became my homies when I moved to New York five years later. It was an awesome posse of players, the first all-black session I ever did. It was also the first time I ever did coke, with them, between sessions at the Montecito Hotel.

The players, besides me, were: Bill Eaton, arranger; Ralph MacDonald, percussion; Bill Salter, bass (Ralph and Bill had not yet written “Where is the Love” and wouldn’t until

I can’t find it. [Jason?]. Obviously, “Mr. Magic” and “Just the Two of Us,” also from the pen and bongos of MacDonald, were yet to come); Arthur Jenkins (who brought Reggae into my life in 1970) ,  piano ; and Rudy Somebody on drums. I’ll write about my adventures with them, particularly with Ralph MacDonald, who I came to know well, on another post.

For now, I’m appending a short story [for the second time, it turns out; I appended once before. Sorry] I wrote years later, just before I came to New York. It is…

From the book Growing Up Jewish in L.A.

THE SUMMER I REBUILT THE VALIANT

By Allan P. Ross

“Hey, asshole, get off the road, your rings are shot!” were the actual words the biker used to convince me to rebuild my 1961 Plymouth Valiant. I know that sounds like a pretty big cave-in on my part, but he was a pretty big biker.

He’d been eating my smoke all the way down spiritual, twisting Laurel Canyon Road until he could pass me, which he did just above Sunset Boulevard, yelling and snarling and giving me the finger. I was lucky he wasn’t a Hell’s Angel. I considered it an omen.

My life right then was at a low-water mark. My ladylove (and partner in a house we’d bought together in the Hollywood Hills) had left me, my rock career had tanked, my bank account was empty. My student deferment was the only thing keeping me out of Viet Nam, and that was about to end.

But until it did I had to keep driving the ‘61 Bermuda Blue Valiant with the maroon driver’s-side replacement-door and roped-down hood. It had over 100,000 miles on it, had never been serviced and smoking was not its worst habit, by far.

Nothing sucks like driving a car that is both unchic and decrepit in L.A. But since I couldn’t afford new wheels I had to do something about the Valiant. The problem was I knew nothing about cars and car repair. I was a member of a sub-section of the population not known for caring how things work or keeping them working: male, pre-law, Jewish.

And yet I wanted to do this, i.e., rebuild the Plymouth. And it was not just because I needed transportation. I wanted to be able to say things like, “Your exhaust manifold is loose,” or, “You’ll need a cherry-picker to get that engine outta there,” and know what I just said. I hated being dissed on the road and not understanding the insult. Worse, I am a hothead, and I hated not knowing what to say back.

I had a resource. Warren. Warren was a retired “salt,” an ex-Army tank driver, construction worker, machinist, gandy dancer, jobs that require using one’s back and hands. Which is not to say Warren hadn’t learned to use his head, too.

In fact, I know he thought of himself as a mind- over-muscles kind of guy. Whenever he’d hear me grunt with strain he’d look at whatever I was doing, bray like a mule, and say, “Muscles are for dummies.”

Not that he didn’t have them. Muscles, I mean. Warren was built like an old-fashioned fullback: thick, sinewy ropes connected his head to his body so that his upper limbs seemed to start at his neck. Popeye forearms and powerful hands spoke of years of picks and sledgehammers swung in short arcs, as is necessary in mining and railroad-tie spike-driving. I once asked him if he’d played football in school.

“Well, since they didn’t have no organized teams until the sixth grade, I guess not,” he’d answered.

In spite of his curtailed education he was a current events freak and had been one for so long he could probably qualify as a history freak, too. The small shack he shared with his wife across the road and down in a gully was bursting with books, newspapers, periodicals and any other non-fiction media he could lay his hands on.

“I was a Wobbly before the Russian Revolution,” he told me, fishing through his wallet and proudly showing me his I.W.W. card.

I’d never met a Wobbly, an Industrial Worker of the World, before, and I was impressed.

“Took some balls to join, didn’t it?” I asked.

He shrugged, but I could tell he was surprised I even what he was talking about. His blue eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his “seein’” glasses (he had another pair, very dark, that he couldn’t see out of; Warren was legally blind) and he sucked in the little rivulet of saliva that would always form at the corner of his mouth whenever he got excited.

“For a while there, we had enough members to scare the life outta those sumbitches up in Washington,” he said, winking at me conspiratorially, “you bet we did.

“But I unjoined when Comrade Lenin and Comrade Trotsky took over and tried to get our union to become Bolsheviks. I could see where that was goin’ and I didn’t want any part of it.”

He reminded me a little of Harry Truman right then. He had the clean, square lines of Truman’s face, and his rimless “seein’” glasses focused the sunlight into bright patches under his eyes, just as “Give-’em-Hell” Harry’s did.

“Nosiree. That’s where I disagreed with Big Bill Haywood. He was the Union’s leader, y’see. ‘No sir,’ I told him, ‘you can be a free-thinker and still be an American.’ That’s what I said then, and it’s what I say now.”

He also said he’d be glad to help me with the Valiant, but that I shouldn’t be surprised if it needed to be, well, rebuilt.

I was ecstatic. Up until then I had avoided even using the word, let alone bringing it into a sentence that included me and the Valiant. I half-wished the biker were there, so I could say something like, “It’s not the rings, dickhead, it’s the rocker arm panel (I’d seen that parts description once, by accident), so we’re gonna rebuild the engine.”

And so, one hazy L.A. morning, we parked the Valiant in the dirt field next to my house, jacked it up and put it on blocks (wooden blocks, because concrete blocks can break while you’re under the car, and then you’re just another chuckling auto shop teacher’s story about someone who didn’t take his course).

You could almost hear the neighbors groan when they saw all four wheels of the car leave the ground, because they also knew that moody, Jewish, pre-law draft-dodgers weren’t likely to be handy with tools, and cars up on blocks in front yards may be fine in Georgia and Mississippi but not in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles. I am sure they prayed every night for Warren’s continued robust health.

You’ve got to understand one or two things about Warren: As I said, he was almost blind. Also, because of some speech impediment or habit, he talked a little like Walt Disney’s Goofy. What he said was almost always clever, but the presentation was sometimes a little comical.

It also may help to understand that I was, as I have said, a monumental hothead with a quick temper and a big mouth, “full of sound and fury, etc.,” but full of shit.

So, what the engine-rebuilding process might have looked and sounded like to the casual observer was Goofy the Dog telling Donald Duck how to build a spaceship.

But the partnership worked, and Warren and I became good friends as a result.

Warren would sit ramrod straight in a kitchen chair that I would set next to the part of the car I was working on, and say things like, “That hose is going to be held onto the pipe with either a spring clamp or a screw clamp. Which one is it?”

“I don’t know,” I’d probably say.

Then he’d say, “It’s a spring clamp; even you would recognize a screw clamp.”

Then we’d go across the street and down into his gully to a rusted-out 1932 Model-A Ford that served as his toolbox, to get a special pliers for removing spring clamps.

This process took time, but I had plenty of that. Also, it was entertaining. For one thing, the tool we’d be looking for almost always came with a story.

“I got these pliers when I was pouring cement for FDR’s Redwood City aqueduct,” is the one that came with the spring-clamp pliers.

“Now, Franklin Roosevelt,” Warren said, looking up from his rummaging, “he was sly dog. He never let the right hand know what the left was doing. The Redwood City dam wasn’t built anywhere near Redwood City, y’know. It was built in Wyoming, a thousand miles away.

“Old Roosevelt, see, he couldn’t get Congress to give him the money for the project in Wyoming—people were still bitching about Teapot Dome; you know what that was, don’t you?—so he renamed the project for Redwood City, in Oregon, raised the money and built the dam in Wyoming.

“Here it is,” he said, holding up the spring-clamp pliers and cackling with glee over FDR’s little hijinx.

Another thing: finding and using special tools for special tasks turned out to be a real confidence builder for me, because it made so many more jobs do-able.

But mainly, special tools brought me closer and closer to the amorphous fraternity of people who can do things with their hands. I loved being able to say, “I think we’ll need a half-to-quarter-inch swivel-drive to get to that tie-rod,” and know what I was talking about.

One day, when the last mount bolt was finally off, and the engine had been pared down to just the naked block sitting inside the motor well, I actually heard myself say to Warren, “We’re gonna need a cherry-picker to get that sucker outta there.” What a moment.

There were other, slightly less glorious moments.

There was putting the water pump back on without a gasket, thereby inventing the first self-contained, under-the-hood, high-pressure car wash.

And then there was the great Pin-bearing Panic of ‘69, performed in front of a live audience at sunset, Warren sitting on my lime-green kitchen chair next to the rear fender, me under the back axle, proudly removing the universal-joint while several of my friends watched.

“Arnie, now, you gotta be real careful when you get the plate off the joint; you don’t want to drop those pin-bearings,” Warren said, in a loud, clear voice.

“What are pin-bearings?” I said back.

“Well, they’re right under the plate you’re taking off. They’ll look like a row o’ needles, but they’re just stuck in there with grease, so if you’re not careful as a cat, they’ll—”

“Oh, I see what you’re—”

“…fall right into your—”

“Shit!”

I saw what he was talking about.

Certainly the best moment of all had to be a warm, golden October afternoon with all the cherry-pickers and pin-bearings and gaskets back where they were supposed to be, neighbors on porches and front lawns pretending not to notice what was going on in the dirt lot at the end of their road.

Orville was behind the wheel, Wilbur was hovering over the open engine compartment, nose to carburetor, ear to distributor.

“Okay, turn ‘er over,” Wilbur yelled to Orville.

Orville turned the key, and…

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr,” went the Valiant.

Wilbur held up his hand immediately for Orville to stop.

He did. It took everything he had not to look up and catch the neighbors’ head-shaking and eye-rolling that had to be going on.

But Wilbur was too busy to notice. In a moment, he held up his hand and twirled his index finger in the air.

Orville turned the key again.

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr-rhur-rhur-rhur-rhr-rhr-rh-rh-r-r-r-RHOOOOMMMMM!” went the Valiant.

We had ignition! It was only for a moment, and a very rough ignition it was, the car lurching and pitching in place like a cartoon jalopy. But the engine did turn over, so we knew we’d got most everything back in its place, which to me was tantamount to squaring the circle or curing cancer.

Now I chanced a look at the neighbors. The Chinaman pretended to be going back to raking a leafless front lawn, and the two old gals who lived together at the top of the hill made like they were inspecting the roofline of their red raised-ranch cottage. The little knot of kids that had come out of somebody’s living room where they were probably watching TV were guileless in their lack of pretense.

“Run outta gas?” one of them said, as I let the engine die. “My dad said you don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a chainsaw.”

Warren signaled me to get out of the car and join him at the engine well.

“This is the part you need eyes for,” he said, handing me his homemade timing light. “I’ll crank the engine and you do what I told you.”

He got behind the wheel while I took off the distributor cap to expose the points. (Just saying these things now gives me chills of excitement.)

“Remember,” he reminded me, “you gotta hold the light steady, or it won’t strobe. Tell me when it’s doin’ that.”

“It’s doing that.”

“Okay,” he said, killing the engine and handing me the key, “get back in the car.”

I did. I turned the key, the starter motor turned the engine, the engine turned the crank shaft, the crank meshed with the universal, etc., etc., and we were off.

Several of the neighbors had overcome their skepticism and were clapping. Mac, who lived across the street and up a couple of houses from me and always seemed to be fretting about neighborhood real estate values, seemed to be crying.

As we took off down the hill I saw another “pre-owned”-type vehicle coming at us, left front fender crushed, muffler ruined, smoke billowing up behind it. It was a winding, narrow street, and when I rolled down my window my face was no more than two feet away from the other driver’s.

I smiled and said, “Hey, asshole, your rings are shot. You really should get that fixed.”

Then I sped off down the hill. Even slumped behind the wheel the guy looked pretty big.

I wish I were  still trying to learn mandolin, because he makes it all so clear.  All, that is,  except the part where his signature knack for beautiful note choices kicks in, and you know you’re listening to the real deal in Bluegrass playing. Remember, Roland played guitar and toured with Bill Monroe before Bill died (as opposed to after), and is one of the last men standing in the world of genuine Bluegrass players. (Roland didn’t study the genre in college, like most of us ex-hippies;  HE  was who we studied).

It’s a wonderful learning tool, but I want him to put back his visual demo of  how to tremolo on the mandolin.  It fell off the screen for some reason,  and I’ve asked him and Diane to put it back. You’ll see what  I mean when you go to the site.  And if you agree with me, that it’s an important part of the lesson, email them and tell them. They love feedback from fans, and they respond. Also, you’ll see one of the classiest Sites in all of Roots and Folk Music and hear and learn about one of the half-dozen or so greatest  mandolin players in the whole genre.

This just in. It’s part of Roland’s wife’s answer to my email requesting a visual of the tremolo: “[Though] I didn’t like letting it go that way, I didn’t think we’d
get another decent take without somebody losing patience.
Some other people have asked to be shown tremolo and given
some tips.  It’s on the list.  Roland also addressed this in the Mandolin
Christmas book and recorded a track demo-ing and talking about it.
If you have that you might want to go back and listen.”

My guess is you can get these items from the site for the asking.

*                       *                        *

Same time as I got the Danny Boy demo from M/M White, I heard from old friend Chuck Erikson, one-time banjo-maker and now king—or should I say “Duke?—of the mother-of-pearl business worldwide. Yes, planet-inclusive.  And that means the Far East, too, an area you might guess would be harvesting and selling the most pearl of all.

Anyway,  Chuck just got a….y’know what?  I’m going to let him tell about it thru the e-note he sent me yesterday:

“Here’s a nice little article on Duke of Pearl that just came out in Acoustic Guitar Magazine:” http://www.acousticguitar.com/article/default.aspx?articleid=25360

The Acoustic Guitar article  does justice to a man that, so far, has had  one of  the most colorful and variegated lives of anyone I know.  And now one of the hottest.  Not only has AG seen fit to profile him in depth, but it looks like Fretboard Journal is going to do a piece on him. Why are all my old friends getting writ up, while the only one writing about me is me?  Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, not a mandolin player or mother-of-pearl tycoon. Yeah, that must be it. A writer.

Chuck’s trippy website is http://www.dukeofpearl.com/. Prepare to spend some time there.

*                         *                         *

Speaking of writing—like that segue?—,  I continue to make good on my promise (threat?) to publish short stories I’ve written over the last couple decades. After all, I’m having an interesting life, too. At least my therapist tells me I am. Here’s a short-short tale of my youngest son’s first music  concert (he’s a sax player, but he loves pickers from our era. He’s the one that got me to start this blog in the first place). He hadn’t been in this country very long (both my sons are adopted Korean brothers) when the following action took place:

BENNY’S FIRST CONCERT

I was at the computer when Ben, my younger son, kicked open the front door and announced his candidacy for the Lewisboro Little League All-Stars Team. “I’m a slam-dunk,” were his exact words, and I felt my stomach tighten as if to counterbalance his own breezy assurance.

Little League is very political, and our family was not good at that artform. I desperately looked for a way to support and yet still prepare him for a painful letdown.

And then, from out of nowhere, came this guided missile of a gift: “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m supposed to tell you guys the concert is May 29th. What’s to eat?”

The annual Katonah-Lewisboro Elementary School Musicale is not an eagerly awaited event. But I saw in it a chance to balance the ledger in case the All-Star team somehow overlooked Mr. Dunk. I said, sharing a thick slab of firey kim-chee (both my sons are Korean), “you’re going to do something nobody expects.”

“Whuzzat,” he said?

“You’re going to be good,” I said, my eyes tearing from the food. “And I’m going to help you do it.” His eyes rolled back in his head as maybe he remembered my helping him with his pinewood Derby car; or maybe it was his Styrofoam solar system for a Third Grade science project. No matter; I had a plan. And he was already a good saxophone player.

We picked two songs to go straight for a forty-something audience’s jugular:  The theme from “Casablanca” and “I will Survive,” the Donna Summer crowd-pleaser of the early ‘Eighties (or was it the late ’70’s; would you pls look it up and tell me? Thanks.)   “Mr. Feldman [the music teacher] said only one song each.”  The kim-chee welts were finally responding to the yogurt I was shoveling into my mouth, so I was able to say,  “you’ll need an encore.”

And then we did something almost unheard of in public school music education: we practiced.   We put in half an hour a day for two and a half months, Ben on my King “Slip-action” E-flat alto sax, me on my ES-335 Gibson Electric. Although the ritual brought us together, Ben couldn’t see any glory dividend to compare to making the All-Star Team, and didn’t hesitate to tell me so.

Son Ben practicing on my King alto sax

[ This is where I wish  I had some shred of  aural  record of us working on those two songs, but I don't. So I'm sending you the next best thing I can think of, a fragment of the CD we sent to Colgate to help Ben get accepted there. My wife still seems to think it was the difference between him getting and not. Who knows?]

The night of the concert was hot and airless, perfect accompaniment to the evening’s program: phalanxes of otherwise harmless American youth committing felonious assault with rented musical appliances;  until it was time for Ben. He was nervous in the wings, always a good sign. I told him to take a deep breath and think about center field. The music teacher introduced us, and unlike anybody else, we tuned up. Then I counted down to the pickup note to “As Time Goes By,” and Benny began to play.

We didn’t go for anything fancy, just straight melody, good tone and the sure-footedness that comes from the unmistakable sound of woodshedding, what musicians call (usually) catch-up practicing. We reprised the last four bars for a “professional” treatment, and went out on a retard with a sustained closing note and chord.

The audience was on its feet before Benny took the mouthpiece from his lips. I told him to bow. They clapped and yelled for more. They wouldn’t stop. The music teacher asked Ben if he had an encore. Ben looked at me, smiled, and began playing the Donna Summer piece. When he finished, the crowd went wild all over again. Why shouldn’t they? With school taxes averaging $10,000 per household (it was 1987; that was a considered a lot of money then) weren’t they entitled to something more for their money than the cacophony  of  80 students playing every cent (one one-hundredth of an octave) of pitch on every single note they collectively hit? I mean, what were these kids supposed to be learning to make in music class, music or sonic mayhem?

Later that night, over a pie at La Famiglia Pizza and Pasta, Ben learned he didn’t make the All¬ Star team. I tried to console him, but his friends were also there, and they kept interrupting me to tell him how good he sounded up on the stage “and everything.”  Between mouthfuls,  he eventually said it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, not making the All-Star team. I think his exact words were, “I’m re-thinking my priorities. Could you pass that piece with the pepperoni?”

© Allan Ross 2010

Anyway, I was sorting out some old quarter-inch tapes I had and found one that said “Southern Mountain Boys” on the edge label. I looked inside (I hadn’t for about 40 years) and found a contents list in my handwriting and a note that said the tape was made by Roland and, as it turned out, a pickup band he put together when he was serving as a medic at an army base in Germany in 1962.

I shot Roland, who lives in Nashville, an email and he called back in what must have been the time it took his computer terminal to go boink. We talked for quite awhile, something we decided we prob. hadn’t done since Clarence’s funeral in 1973, and then only distractedly and not really into chatting.

Anyway, Roland was very interested in the tape, was really surprised that it even existed. But as we talked, and I read down a set list or two to him, he began to remember quite a bit about the guys who made it, and how they had all come together under his nurturing tutelage  in Europe at the height of the Cold War. The band is far better than it had a right to be, what with its non-professional, potluck personnel and all. And the singing is unabashedly the real deal.  It’s rumored that Roland carries around a little sack of fairy Bluegrass dust wherever he is, and that year he was in Germany.

I didn’t make a recording of the tape for myself, as I am a lazy lout. But if you’re interested, get in touch with Roland at his website, http://www.rolandwhite.com/, which is worth a visit by all mandolin enthusiasts, Bluegrass personnel and fans.

Do that and you will find:  a serious site for mandolin students; info on The Roland White Band’s  latest CD,  Jelly on my Tofu, a mellow killer on Copper Creek Records; an homage to Clarence in the form of an instruction manual with CD’s for learning how to play just like him in two days (three tops);  and a few samples of some of the finest mandolin playing anywhere on the planet from Naples to Nashville.

Roland’s style of playing may be less driving than, say, Bill Monroe’s, Jesse McReynolds’ or Scott Hambly’s, but his note choice and lyrical fluidity, his ability to find the most natural sounding notes on a difficult instrument, is without equal. He gives you a reason to take up the mandolin, if you already haven’t.

In fact, that’s much of what his site is about—mandolin instruction. I don’t want to overstate it, but lessons from Roland will give you insights into Bluegrass from the very cockpit.  Can you think of anyone else teaching mandolin these days who played with Bill Monroe?

Speaking of things you can’t get anywhere else, here’s a fragment of “Just a Used-to-be” from a gig the Country Boys did at the Ash Grove sometime in the middle ‘Sixties. If you would like to have the whole thing—and be advised: it contains one of the most spectacular instrumental breaks Clarence ever took in that venerable venue—leave a comment and your email address and I’ll send you the whole tune.

Meanwhile, go treat yourself to what Bluegrass sounds like these days and get the CD. Get two (I get a quarter of a cent for every unit Roland sells via Power Pickers of the ’60’s).

Around 1964 or ’65 Bess and I were teaching  guitar classes in UCLA extension. We were talking out of school one day and I decided to ask her about a Woody Guthrie story I’d heard from Lonnie Feiner, a musician-friend of mine from the Bay Area and LA. I wanted to know was it true or apocryphal or what? After all,   Bess’d been a close friend of Woody’s, learned mandolin from him and sang in the Almanac Singers with him; she might know, I figured.

So, here’s Lonnie’s Woody Guthrie story, which, btw, I’ve made no effort to research, because that takes the fun right out of it.

Sometime in the middle 1940’s the Ladies Auxiliary, the women’s organization that provided succor and other things to the folks in the front lines of  the labor movement, came to Woody and asked him to write a song for them and their contributions. For the second time.

“Ladies,” he said (and I am paraphrasing liberally here) “I’ve already written ‘Union Maid’  for you and you said you liked it.” He had and they did.   Small wonder.  Listen to it.

“Union Maid”

(Yes, it’s a send-up of “Redwing.” Hello!  that’s what Woody Guthrie did,  send-ups.)

“Well, it’s a good song, Mr. Guthrie,” the women said, according to my friend Lonnie. “The problem is that it’s not dignified enough for us.”

“What do you mean by ‘dignified?’” Woody said.

“Well, we ARE the wives and helpers of striking and picketing Union members, and we think we should have a song that tells people who we are and what we do in the Labor Movement.”

“But, doesn’t ‘Union Maid’ do tha—’” Woody began.

“Please, Mr. Guthrie,” the ladies said. “We won’t bother you again,” or something to that effect.

“’Dignified?’ you say,” said Woody. “Okay, ladies, why don’t you come back in about a week and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

They did and so did he, and this is what he played and sang for them.

Ladies Auxiliary

Pretty droll, what? Lonnie said they decided to stay with “Union Maid.”

Bess was laughing before I finished the story. “I don’t know, Al,” she said, “it does sound like vintage Woody, but I couldn’t verify that. But I also couldn’t verify that isn’t. You’re on your own about saying it’s fact or fiction.”

“Thank you, Ms. Hawes,” I said. ”I mean, you are the word.”

“Thanks, Al,” she said, “but if you really DON’T know if it happened or not, and you DO say it really happened, or even that you heard it happened, be aware that you’re creating folklore and toying with the gods of collective narrative [or wds to that effect]. You have been warned.” Bess had this impish streak, you see.

I’m not bashful. I tell the story and play the song in many of my performances, and  I don’t explain or qualify either of them nearly as much as I have here

“I’ve done various freebies online, a Bakersfeild section for the Rockabilly Hall Of Fame, and a   buddy of mine name Thomas Abrunner has a Clarecne White timeline page, I added the info on his bar-band the Roustabouts to the Reasons/Nashville West page: http://www.burritobrother.com/reasons.htm

“It’s a work in progress, the Roustabouts were the forgotten bar-band, which ran parallel to the Reasons/Nashville West, which is the group most historians (well, all really) write about when talking about Clarence’s pre-Byrds, post-Bluegrass career.”

It’s a terrific site, not at all academic-feeling,  but chock-a-block with details and data on the Country Boys/Kentucky Colonels,  as well as other talent.

Sammy Masters, photo courtesy Jason Odd.

In a follow-up email Jason asked me if I remembered Sammy Masters and Cal’s Corral, a legendary auto dlrship in So. California in the 50’s and 60’s, maybe even in later decades, owned and operated by Cal Worthington, a country-speakin’  spokesman for his company. So, here you go, Jason:

Yes, I remembered the name Sammy Masters,  but not well enough to put a face on him til I saw this one, from you.  And of course I remember Cal’s Corral. My dad  bought three Chryslers there, a ‘47 New Yorker Highlander, a ‘52 New Yorker two-door, and a ‘56 300 C which I sold to Roland White in 1966.

A '56 Chrysler 300C. Mine was red, white and black and was later sold to Roland White for $300.

I also remember vividly a stint the  Country Boys/Ky Colonels did with Joe and Rosalie Maphis, a real live Country-Vaudeville husband-and-wife  act working the LA area in the early-to-middle ’60’s.  I even remember Clarence co-opting one of Joe’s most terrible licks for a few minutes, ’til Dave Cohen asked him not to. (We, i.e., us Ash Grovies,  were all proprietary about, and  protective of, Clarence’s gift, purists that we were.)

The Maphis couple were truly bad: fast, cornpone and  tasteless. And what made it worse was they were really  country and sincere, unlike, say, Roy Clark, who  was also fast and corny, but sloppy and opportunistic. He seemed not  to give a shit what shape he left country guitar in after he finished using it for his circus act.

The most poignant mental keepsake I have of the Country Boys/Kentucky  Colonels in their Joe and Rosalie Maphis period is of Clarence and Roland putting down their axes in the middle of  a double-time fiddle tune to hand Joe his instruments, one after another, for his own circus act. And you can only imagine how happy Eric White, Sr., who went to nearly every gig his sons played, was with that caper.

I know the Brothers White didn’t like it, either, but they were  still learning what you do and don’t do for your art and your  daily bread in the music biz. (You know, Jason, that the ‘ Boys were often on the balls of their asses,  financially,  during the ’50’s and first yrs of the ’60’s.  Were it me, I  wouldn’t  have done anything different if I thought I’d starve but for gainful employment with the Maphises. But I also knew I’d be getting the fuck out of there as fast as you could smell a Pink’s hot dog with chili and onions on my breath.  I think the ‘Boys might have taken a little longer than that, thinking there might have been some sort of future with the  Maphisim.

Pink’s Hot Dogs (which some of us called, simply, “Boris”) on La Brea and Melrose, frequent and required dining at all hours for Ash Grove performers and staff.

Well, Jason,  that’s the post part of this post.  As  threatened, I’m enclosing another chapter in my proposed book, “Growing Up Jewish in LA.” For my future publisher to see, you understand.

CA

> BTW,  I still remember the Joe Maphis lick Dave Cohen  forbade Clarence to play. In fact, I can actually play it myself, and I will, as soon as I get my price.

And now…

…from the book Growing Up Jewish in L.A.

GOOD FOR THE JEWS by Allan P. Ross

“Joe Louis is good for the Jews.”

This is the unanimous decision reached by the boy’s father, grandfather and uncle as they listen to the Brown Bomber defend his title for the 22nd straight time.

“Is Joe Louis Jewish?” asks the five-year-old boy.

The three men gathered around the radio in the grandfather’s kitchen smile. The grandfather pinches the boy’s cheek and the father brushes a shock of golden hair back from his son’s forehead.

“No, sweetheart,” the father says, “but he is very good for us, and sometimes that’s even better than being one of us.”

The three men are speaking mainly Yiddish, which the boy can only partially understand. But he’s seen the wise nodding and narrow-eyed appraisal that goes with the words “Zol zein guten far wir” enough times in the past to know it means “it’s good for us,” and that “us” always means “Jews.”

Only the day before, his mother had used the phrase in connection with the Presidential election of 1928.

“Everybody in the Home wanted Al Smith,” she’d said, “but it didn’t mean anything, we were all underage.” The “Home” she was talking about was Vista del Mar, a Jewish orphanage in Santa Monica where she and her two sisters and a brother had spent their junior and senior high school years.

“Was Al Smith Jewish?” the boy had asked.

“No, my precious,” she’d answered, “he was Catholic. That’s why he was popular with the Jews.”

The boy had nodded even though he hadn’t understood. His mother had used a certain voice that meant it should be accepted as self-proven. Generally speaking, people and things that were Zol zein guten far wir were self-proven.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the most Zol zein guten far wir the boy had ever heard of. The mere mention of his name would get nods of approval at all family get-togethers whenever it was invoked.

“No, love, he wasn’t Jewish” the boy’s mother had said, “but people who didn’t like him said he might as well have been.”

This was followed by an exchange in Yiddish with the boy’s father recalling how Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing rabble-rouser, had called the President “Franklin Delano Rosenfeld” whenever he could.

“Do you remember that, Benny?” she’d said to her husband.

He nodded, yes, he remembered.

Over the years, the boy, a beautiful, flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked youth p Herschel, came to understand the subtleties of the phrase “good for us.” Not that he could explain them easily to an outsider, or even to himself.

“It’s just something you feel,” he would repeat to himself after hearing it from his mother, Zora.

Harry Truman, all New York mayors from La Guardia forward and, until 1945, Joseph Stalin, were considered friends of the Jews, at least in his family. And in the immediate post-War years in Los Angeles, that’s all a young Jewish boy could rely on.

Growing up Jewish in Los Angeles meant being constantly on the alert for anti-Semitism, wherever it could be found. Obviously, that would be amongst gentiles (his mother and father never said Goyim; it was considered prejudiced and in poor taste).

Therefore, the search was always on for Christians who were either overtly or implicitly pro-Jewish. And, since there really were no gentiles who were openly supportive of Jews in 1946, that meant ferreting out those whose policies, works or entertainment content somehow helped the Jewish cause.

Joe Louis, a handsome Black man who did his race proud and beat Max Schmeling, a Nazi, was a major friend of the Jews, even if he didn’t know it. It only enhanced his reputation that he sometimes trained at Gilman’s Hot Springs, one of four Jewish resorts in Southern California, and that Uncle Yankel had actually shaken hands with him. Yankel also and won a bundle on several of his fights.

“Jackie Robinson, now this is a sportsman,” his Grandpa Sam would say, after the Brooklyn Dodger broke the color line in major league baseball. He said “sportsman,” because Shiminu, an elegant, 65-year-old Polish Jew not at all in touch with the pop culture of his adopted land, was never sure exactly what sport Jackie Robinson played. But his son and son-in-law talked about Jackie in revered tones, so he figured it was QED to put him in the lineup of friends of the Jews. By the time Roy Campanella became a Dodger Grandpa Sam had already developed a bottom-line attitude about the issue. “How bad can it be [for the Jews] that a colored man can do this thing?”

Speaking of Poland, the ex-home of the largest concentration of Jews on the planet, it was once good for the Jews, but no longer. It was called “The Old Country” in the boy’s family, and it was agreed that it never really was good for us, that it was always a disaster waiting to happen.

“Why didn’t everyone leave?” the boy would ask his Grandfather, who had left in 1912.

This would bring an exchange of deeply troubled looks between whomever in the family was there, and, sometimes, the start of an explanation. The explanation would be conducted on two levels, one in English with sprinkled-in Yiddish, for the boy, the other in Polish, for the adults still debating what had happened and how could they have been so naïve.

When Motke, his grandmother, was still alive, it would move very quickly through the English and Yiddish to Polish, and would soon be accompanied by tears. Once it occasioned Motke and Shiminu warily pulling out an album of family photos from the Old Country.

“This was my brother, Israel, and his wife, Zora, and their children, Mimi, Shura and Majka,” Motke had said. But she and Shiminu had almost immediately been forced to give up the project. All had been lost in the War.

France, on the other hand, had never been friends of ours. Although admired for its culture, the mention of it would bring tightly-shut eyes, side-to-side headshakes and mouths drawn up in expressions of dismissal.

“At least the French are honest about hating us,” Shiminu would say. “The rest of them are lying hypocrites.” This would include the Hungarians, Russians and Czechs and, from time to time, depending on their position vis-à-vis Palestine (his family didn’t call it Israel), the British; the Austrians (“Worse than the Nazis”); and, of course, the Germans, although Willi Brandt would later become a “fellow traveler,” if not a friend. In truth, however, you could never again trust the Germans, no matter what they did to right their unspeakable wrong, or what anyone said about them. That was emes, i.e., on the level.

The boy could not see a pattern in how his family determined who was and wasn’t their friend for the first seven years of his life. Up to that point, friends seemed to come in in any number of ways, none of them predictable.

For example, Clarence Darrow, after arguing for the principle of evolution in the Scopes trial, was quickly embraced as a friend.

“How could you not like a man who has the nerve to say we’re descended from monkeys,” reasoned his grandfather.

On the other hand, Richard M. Nixon, a gerrymandering, mud-slinging demagogue from Whittier, California, came in over the transom for supporting a Jewish homeland in Israel. In 1946 Israel was a non-event/non-starter in terms of importance and impact on everyone in America except the Jews, and Nixon quickly understood that it would cost him nothing in political cash to be in favor of the proposition, and might win him some friends among Jews, despite their overwhelmingly Democratic voting record. He was right.

Then came 1948, a watershed year for the boy, with two headline-grabbers for the Sons of Abraham.

First came the United Nations recognizing Israel as a sovereign state. This was very, very Good for the Jews. It was the first time in modern history that the official language would be written with Hebrew letters, and the first time ever that Jews could be completely themselves at home, not worrying if they were being too loud in public or if their noses were the wrong shape or too big.

Then came the unexpected victory/election of Harry S. Truman to the United States Presidency. Truman had already been anointed because of his Vice Presidency under Roosevelt and his support of Israel. But very few considered him a real contender for President. His election was like a very gratifying greps, belch, for American Jews.

This time when the boy asked if the friend was Jewish, the answer was a little different than it usually would. His mother looked at him, and the smile was little less wistful and resigned than usual.

“No, my darling,” she said, “but he’s a liberal.”

“What’s a liberal?” the boy asked.

“That’s someone who’s for the underdog,” his mother said. “That’s why Jews voted for him. But it isn’t necessary to tell your friends at school who your father and I supported.”

“But he won,” said the boy.

“I know,” said the mother, “but voting is private and personal. You don’t have to let anyone know how you voted. It’s one of the most important rights in this country. Besides, everyone else in the neighborhood voted for Dewey, and it could…” she paused here, for no reason the boy could see, and her eyes seemed to turn inward.

“Could what? insisted the boy.

She refocused on him, and seemed to come to some decision about how to finish the sentence.

“It just could cause us a little trouble, that’s all,” she said. The boy knew that tone of voice, and knew he’d have to make do with that explanation until he was older, or found out from someone else in the neighborhood.

In the meantime, the word liberal became embedded in his mind as something almost holy, inviolable, sacrosanct for Jews.

The Daily News, the only Los Angeles newspaper to support Truman, was a liberal paper, the last such daily in Los Angeles. It died in the mid-’Fifties from malnutrition. Until it did, it refused to identify personalities in the news by race or color, when virtually every newspaper east of New York used terms like “a Negro youth saved a white tot from the savage fangs of a rabid dog,” or “12 Chinese Arrested for Gambling.” It also refused to carry any advertising that specified ethnic preferences, and carried the cartoons of Herblock, a card-carrying liberal who knew how to make his marks look like bums, and drew this reposte from Nixon/McCarthy:

Interviewer: Mr. McCarthy, do you really shave three times a day?

McCarthy: Yes.

Int: Why?

McCarthy: Because I don’t want to look like a Herblock character, that’s why.

Being a liberal was really all you had to know about someone, if push came to shove. It was never put that way, exactly, but the boy could tell from what was said and not said, especially between his mother and father, that that was the way things were.

Sometimes, it came in the form of elliptical conversations his folks would have with teachers, at parents’ night, for example, this exchange with Mrs. Colani, the boy’s Third Grade teacher.

Parents (to Mrs. Colani): Some election, wasn’t it?

Mrs. C: Yes, it was.

Parents: We were sure surprised.

Mrs. C: So were my husband and I.

Parents: Everyone was. And what does he do, your husband?

Mrs. C: He’s a police lieutenant.

Parents (sharing private smile with Mrs. C): Then he must be happy.

Mrs. C: We both are.

Parents: Us, too.

The L.A.P.D. was unionized by then, and Truman was a staunch union supporter. Unions were good for the Jews.

All in all, 1948 was turning out to be a banner year for the boy’s family in terms of having friends in high places, although Hollywood was yet to be conquered. Remember, “Good for the Jews” refers primarily to gentiles or gentile situations that are good for Jews.

Until they managed to convince themselves that Frank Sinatra recorded Bei Mir Bist Du Schön, which he didn’t, the boy’s family felt they didn’t have a solid gentile friend in show business. Although they had favorite actors, like Lana Turnip, Judy Garlic and Olivia de Halivah, and Xavier Cugat laced his stage rap with Yiddishisms, and Nat King Cole raised a toast to Chaim Weizman and David Ben-Gurion one night at Frank Sennes’ Moulin Rouge, a big Hollywood nightclub, no one in the business not already Jewish could be tagged as openly sympathetic to Jews.

But Sinatra changed all that.

He made it possible for Bob Hope to lift his entire style from Jack Benny (according to his family), and that was the wedge that opened up all of Hollywood to the Jews. It didn’t matter if they were Republican or Democrat, if they were in “The Industry” they were liberal, and if they were liberal, “Zol zein guten far wir,” it was “Good for us.”

With Truman, Israel and Hollywood in their hip pockets, the members of the boy’s family were more secure than any Jews they’d ever heard of, time out of mind. More secure than they had any right to be. It was the best time ever for the Jews.

That’s why when the mother told her son they were changing their last name from Rosenberg to Ross he knew once and for all he’d never get it right.

BTW, Sammy Davis, Jr., was not considered particularly good for the Jews. But you knew that.

I was at a party chez Barry Hansen* in Santa Monica, prob. in 1966 or ’67. My girlfriend at the time, singer Alice Gunn, was there with me. Also present, along with  Bob Hite, Blind Al Wilson  (the pair who would later form the nuclei of Canned Heat) and other LA folk music luminaries , were singer-songwriter Marc Levine† and player-student John Fahey.

We were all students at UCLA in their Graduate Program of Anglo-American Folklore and Folk Music, studying our roots and staying out of Nam with student deferments. It was a rowdy, drunken soiree in a folk-music dept. grad-student way, part picking, part academic be-scene event.

I don’t know what led up to it, or what he said, but at some point in the evening Fahey began insulting Alice, who was still my girlfriend. It surprised and pissed me off, what with John and me being co-dependent with the same department for our IIs deferments.

“I think he was trying to score on her, Country,” said Barry, later.

“And she blew him off so he started potty-mouthing her, right?” I said, also later.

“No, actually, Country, I think she said ‘yes.’”

“B-But she was my girlfriend at the time!” I said, stunned.

“Hmmm,” mused Barry. “About what time was that?”

“Was what?” I said.

“When Alice was still your girlfriend.”

“Who said she was ever not my girlfriend?”

“I don’t know, Country, who?” said Barry. Barry could always put me in the hall of mirrors, and he was in good form that nite.

Anyway, all that came long after the incident. Besides, it wouldn’t have helped to know when Alice had stopped being my girlfriend at the time, because I’d been too high to know when I’d stopped being her boyfriend because I was seen hitting on—aah, forget it. All you need to know is that what I heard, courtesy provocateur extraordinaire Marc Levine, was that Fahey had profaned my girlfriend, and attention had to be paid.

I found John peeing on Barry’s front lawn and called him out on it (his raunch, not the lawn; we were already on the lawn). To my alarm, he took me up on it. Oh, shit, I remember thinking at the time. John was supposed to be a martial artist of sort, maybe Judo or very early karaoke, no one knew for sure. Plus, even tho’ he was drunk and high, like me, he was a lot bigger.

I backed out of the encounter, humiliated. A day or so later, consumed by my bad showing, I decided to do something about it.

So I enrolled in a self-defense class in UCLA Extension, determined to choose Fahey off again, but this time be ready for a fight. Btw, I am grad student at this time.  Can we say immature?

Tho’ I wanted to give it a chance, the class seemed kind of silly to me. It was full of people, mostly guys and a couple of butch chicks, who looked like they’d had encounters similar to mine, i.e., gotten into situations they wished they could have handled honorably. The instructor reminded me a lot of Sergeant Bilko, tighter in body, but not blessed with the humor gene. Or so I thought.

He started off every session by pairing us into twosomes and then having us try to take wooden clubs  away from each other, while menacing each other with loud noises. Sometimes he also wanted us to butt heads with one another. And  for a special treat he would have us knee each other in the groin (all the guys had to wear cups. Years later I still felt bad for the two women  as cup envy was no less traumatic then as it is today).

At the end of the first day he asked for questions. I had many.

“Where are we going to find assailants that do these things, sir?” I asked.

“What things?” he said.

“Like  yell at us while they try to take our sticks, butt our heads and knee us in our cups, sir?”

“Idiot,” he said, “that’s what you’re supposed to do. They’re attacking you.”

“Do they know that? Sir?”

“Know what?”

“I mean, do they have scripts or something, sir?”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Ross, sir

Bilko: “Take a lap, Ross.” A lap was kind of serious at UCLA. It was basically the cross-country course, 1.8 miles long,  over some of the steepest Sunset Hills, around stadia, ballparks and basketball courts.

“I don’t know if I can do that, sir. I’m a heavy smoker.”

“Take a pack of Marlboros with you.” Did I say the man didn’t have a sense of humor? My bad.

If  you were a partner who’d lost his stick,  Sgt. Bilko had lots of things you could do with your now-empty hands. E.g., you could clap both of them, at the same time and hard, over your adversary’s ears, as if his head were air and your palms were cymbals. Everybody liked to do this, hated having it done to them, so much so that they purposely tried to lose their sticks to opponents who didn’t want them.

So what you had there was a gymful of cowards running around with sticks they were trying to force on other cowards who were clapping the air in front of them like seals. It was yrs later before I realized having an assailant fall down laughing in front you wasn’t the worst self-defensive measure you could take.

Then there were the “moves” all males are taught at diff. times in their lives,  guaranteed to disarm axe-murderers, break thick necks and cause East LA gang-members to vomit non-stop while you called the cops.

I always wondered, whether in the Cub Scouts, YMCA or Hebrew school,  how you could get an assailant to freeze in a threatening position, or at least slow down enough so that you could plant one of your legs behind one of his, push him the chest and—bada bing, bada boom—leave him writhing on the ground while you again called the cops.

We did lots of laps, which was the best preparation Sgt. Bilko ever gave us, because it was the most practical: we were the type of people who would probably choose flight over fight when push came to shove, no matter how good we got at encouraging stick theft.

Anyway, I graduated from the UCLA academy of self-defense, and began a series of lengthy vigils on the steps of various campus bldgs Fahey and I both took classes in, until one day he came down one of them and we caught each others’ eyes.

I figured it was a moment of truth for me, altho’ I still hoped we wouldn’t get it on, since he was still bigger than me and good at Asian take-down techniques and tile-breaking with hand-edges and things like.  I even hoped  this might disqualify him from punching out with me because his chops would be considered lethal weapons and were prob. registered with the local police station. Yeah,  right.

In the event, I tried to glare at him, tho the best I could muster was something like a yeshiva-bucher frown. I didn’t know how he’d react to this. Shit, I didn’t even know if he knew I’d been in deep training for a rematch he prob. didn’t know about. Maybe he didn’t really see me, after all. But I told myself to be ready for anything, as my self-defense master had instructed me to be. Still, I found myself thinking about laps, and how good one of them looked right then.

As it turned out, I did catch his eye. But  to my supreme surprise and relief  his body sank into a slump almost as soon as he saw me. He looked at me a long time but  not at all menacingly, sucked in a deep breath and walked,  shaking his head and weeping,  toward  where I was standing. He held out both hands, not, as it turned out,  for ear-clapping but for hugging.

He told me  in mid-embrace  how terrible he’d felt about what he’d said that nite to Alice, how he’d heard about me enrolling in a self-defense class, felt shitty about that, too,  but had just never got around to apologizing for causing it. Now he was blubbering mea culpas all over the place and insisting we go to the Student Union where we would drink coffee  laced with Southern Comfort.  To cement the deal he opened his briefcase and showed me the bottle in it.  (I carried pot in my briefcase. Once I carried a kilo of it, which I sold after school to an Ass’t. Professor I knew.  Ah, the ‘Sixties].

Over coffee and Comfort he insisted on arranging to tie a rawhide thong like the one he, Al Wilson and Henry Vestine (Canned Heat guitarists-singers) wore around their wrists, in a secret ceremony he performed for only his very closest friend. How could I say no, especially since I was soon bawling, too, professing my brotherly love for him and the musicians—Bukka White, Charley Patton and Son House—we’d all come to know about and love, largely thanks to his research and sleuthing.

It was all a little strange, but I was OK with the outcome, and I do think it gave him some small relief that a wrong in his life had been righted. We walked to the Student Union together, talking about Folklore Dept  Chairman D.K. Wilgus’ most recent whisky binge and bad-mouthing Mark Levine, who we both agreed provoked the incident in the first place.

BTW, I did indeed let him knot a thong around my wrist in a private, but not very arcane, ceremony, held at his house in, I think, Venice. I was never sure exactly what the thong signified, but I think it had something to do with sincerity, brotherhood and Delta Blues. That would make sense.

*Barry was to make his bones a few years later as Doctor Demento. His dump at the time this story unfolds was home to more blues, R&B, Rock, race, minstrel, folk etc., etc. records than I’d ever seen before, except at blues scholar Bob Hite’s place. Bob, as you remember, was the eventual co-founder and leader of Canned Heat. He’s kind of important in my own musical journey, because he took an interest in my band, Evergreen Blueshoes, q.v. in other posts in this blog, and got us into the Topanga Corral, thus launching our meteoric rise to the lower levels of public consciousness in 1968 and ‘69.

† I settled my hash with Levine, too,  but somewhat later; in fact, later enough that I felt comfortable recording one of his songs, Amsterdam, with the Blueshoes.

-30-

—————— * —————— * ———————

Yes, Jason, this all happened–the Episcopalians call it  “a true saying”–pretty much the way I’ve set it down here, which took a little longer than I thought it would, what with my psychological insights and everything. I mention this because I have more Fahey stories that I thought I was going to tell you in this post.  Now, they’ll have to wait. But there’s no reason I can’t tease you a little bit with coming attractions.

“How John Fahey Embarrassed the UCLA Folklore Dept. by Getting One of the Earliest M.A.’s They Ever Awarded” (he was a known freak and druggie, remember).

“How John Fahey Got Hisself 86’d from my own Eagle Music Shop at the Ash Grove When He Said ‘This guitar sucks,’ to a Lady Who Was About to Buy it for Her Son.”  It was the first time many of us had ever heard the term.

“Ash Grove Perennial Dave Cohen Wins $10 Bet with Fahey that He Could Imitate Fahey’s Unique Guitar Style, on Stage in a Live Performance, with no practice at all.” Fahey paid off because even he was convinced Cohen had somehow copped his technique. Cohen was a master technician. He could imitate almost any guitarist, tho’ he usually missed their essence. BTW, John and Dave hated each other with a scorching ferocity.

Jason, following is the indulgence I give myself to publish short stories that will otherwise never see the light of day. You needn’t concern yourself with them, unless you want to. For the record, I’m proud of them & think they should be published.

From the [proposed] book Growing Up Jewish in L.A.

THE SUMMER I REBUILT THE VALIANT

Allan P. Ross

“Hey, asshole, get off the road, your rings are shot!” were the actual words the biker used to convince me to rebuild my 1961 Plymouth Valiant. I know that sounds like a pretty big cave-in on my part, but he was a pretty big biker.

He’d been eating my smoke all the way down spiritual, twisting Laurel Canyon Road until he could pass me, which he did just above Sunset Boulevard, yelling and snarling and giving me the finger. I was lucky he wasn’t a Hell’s Angel. I considered it an omen.

My life right then was at a low-water mark. My ladylove (and partner in a house we’d bought together in the Hollywood Hills) had left me, my rock career had tanked, my bank account was empty. My student deferment was the only thing keeping me out of Viet Nam, and that was about to end.

But until it did I had to keep driving the ‘61 Bermuda Blue Valiant with the maroon driver’s-side replacement-door and roped-down hood. It had over 100,000 miles on it, had never been serviced and smoking was not its worst habit, by far.

Nothing sucks like driving a car that is both unchic and decrepit in L.A. But since I couldn’t afford new wheels I had to do something about the Valiant. The problem was I knew nothing about cars and car repair. I was a member of a sub-section of the population not known for caring how things work or keeping them working: male, pre-law, Jewish.

And yet I wanted to do this, i.e., rebuild the Plymouth. And it was not just because I needed transportation. I wanted to be able to say things like, “Your exhaust manifold is loose,” or, “You’ll need a cherry-picker to get that engine outta there,” and know what I just said. I hated being dissed on the road and not understanding the insult. Worse, I am a hothead, and I hated not knowing what to say back.

I had a resource. Warren. Warren was a retired “salt,” an ex-Army tank driver, construction worker, machinist, gandy dancer, jobs that require using one’s back and hands. Which is not to say Warren hadn’t learned to use his head, too.

In fact, I know he thought of himself as a mind- over-muscles kind of guy. Whenever he’d hear me grunt with strain he’d look at whatever I was doing, bray like a mule, and say, “Muscles are for dummies.”

Not that he didn’t have them. Muscles, I mean. Warren was built like an old-fashioned fullback: thick, sinewy ropes connected his head to his body so that his upper limbs seemed to start at his neck. Popeye forearms and powerful hands spoke of years of picks and sledgehammers swung in short arcs, as is necessary in mining and railroad-tie spike-driving. I once asked him if he’d played football in school.

“Well, since they didn’t have no organized teams until the sixth grade, I guess not,” he’d answered.

In spite of his curtailed education he was a current events freak and had been one for so long he could probably qualify as a history freak, too. The small shack he shared with his wife across the road and down in a gully was bursting with books, newspapers, periodicals and any other non-fiction media he could lay his hands on.

“I was a Wobbly before the Russian Revolution,” he told me, fishing through his wallet and proudly showing me his I.W.W. card.

I’d never met a Wobbly, an Industrial Worker of the World, before, and I was impressed.

“Took some balls to join, didn’t it?” I asked.

He shrugged, but I could tell he was surprised I even what he was talking about. His blue eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his “seein’” glasses (he had another pair, very dark, that he couldn’t see out of; Warren was legally blind) and he sucked in the little rivulet of saliva that would always form at the corner of his mouth whenever he got excited.

“For a while there, we had enough members to scare the life outta those sumbitches up in Washington,” he said, winking at me conspiratorially, “you bet we did.

“But I unjoined when Comrade Lenin and Comrade Trotsky took over and tried to get our union to become Bolsheviks. I could see where that was goin’ and I didn’t want any part of it.”

He reminded me a little of Harry Truman right then. He had the clean, square lines of Truman’s face, and his rimless “seein’” glasses focused the sunlight into bright patches under his eyes, just as “Give-’em-Hell” Harry’s did.

“Nosiree. That’s where I disagreed with Big Bill Haywood. He was the Union’s leader, y’see. ‘No sir,’ I told him, ‘you can be a free-thinker and still be an American.’ That’s what I said then, and it’s what I say now.”

He also said he’d be glad to help me with the Valiant, but that I shouldn’t be surprised if it needed to be, well, rebuilt.

I was ecstatic. Up until then I had avoided even using the word, let alone bringing it into a sentence that included me and the Valiant. I half-wished the biker were there, so I could say something like, “It’s not the rings, dickhead, it’s the rocker arm panel (I’d seen that parts description once, by accident), so we’re gonna rebuild the engine.”

And so, one hazy L.A. morning, we parked the Valiant in the dirt field next to my house, jacked it up and put it on blocks (wooden blocks, because concrete blocks can break while you’re under the car, and then you’re just another chuckling auto shop teacher’s story about someone who didn’t take his course).

You could almost hear the neighbors groan when they saw all four wheels of the car leave the ground, because they also knew that moody, Jewish, pre-law draft-dodgers weren’t likely to be handy with tools, and cars up on blocks in front yards may be fine in Georgia and Mississippi but not in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles. I am sure they prayed every night for Warren’s continued robust health.

You’ve got to understand one or two things about Warren: As I said, he was almost blind. Also, because of some speech impediment or habit, he talked a little like Walt Disney’s Goofy. What he said was almost always clever, but the presentation was sometimes a little comical.

It also may help to understand that I was, as I have said, a monumental hothead with a quick temper and a big mouth, “full of sound and fury, etc.,” but full of shit.

So, what the engine-rebuilding process might have looked and sounded like to the casual observer was Goofy the Dog telling Donald Duck how to build a spaceship.

But the partnership worked, and Warren and I became good friends as a result.

Warren would sit ramrod straight in a kitchen chair that I would set next to the part of the car I was working on, and say things like, “That hose is going to be held onto the pipe with either a spring clamp or a screw clamp. Which one is it?”

“I don’t know,” I’d probably say.

Then he’d say, “It’s a spring clamp; even you would recognize a screw clamp.”

Then we’d go across the street and down into his gully to a rusted-out 1932 Model-A Ford that served as his toolbox, to get a special pliers for removing spring clamps.

This process took time, but I had plenty of that. Also, it was entertaining. For one thing, the tool we’d be looking for almost always came with a story.

“I got these pliers when I was pouring cement for FDR’s Redwood City aqueduct,” is the one that came with the spring-clamp pliers.

“Now, Franklin Roosevelt,” Warren said, looking up from his rummaging, “he was sly dog. He never let the right hand know what the left was doing. The Redwood City dam wasn’t built anywhere near Redwood City, y’know. It was built in Wyoming, a thousand miles away.

“Old Roosevelt, see, he couldn’t get Congress to give him the money for the project in Wyoming—people were still bitching about Teapot Dome; you know what that was, don’t you?—so he renamed the project for Redwood City, in Oregon, raised the money and built the dam in Wyoming.

“Here it is,” he said, holding up the spring-clamp pliers and cackling with glee over FDR’s little hijinx.

Another thing: finding and using special tools for special tasks turned out to be a real confidence builder for me, because it made so many more jobs do-able.

But mainly, special tools brought me closer and closer to the amorphous fraternity of people who can do things with their hands. I loved being able to say, “I think we’ll need a half-to-quarter-inch swivel-drive to get to that tie-rod,” and know what I was talking about.

One day, when the last mount bolt was finally off, and the engine had been pared down to just the naked block sitting inside the motor well, I actually heard myself say to Warren, “We’re gonna need a cherry-picker to get that sucker outta there.” What a moment.

There were other, slightly less glorious moments.

There was putting the water pump back on without a gasket, thereby inventing the first self-contained, under-the-hood, high-pressure car wash.

And then there was the great Pin-bearing Panic of ‘69, performed in front of a live audience at sunset, Warren sitting on my lime-green kitchen chair next to the rear fender, me under the back axle, proudly removing the universal-joint while several of my friends watched.

“Arnie, now, you gotta be real careful when you get the plate off the joint; you don’t want to drop those pin-bearings,” Warren said, in a loud, clear voice.

“What are pin-bearings?” I said back.

“Well, they’re right under the plate you’re taking off. They’ll look like a row o’ needles, but they’re just stuck in there with grease, so if you’re not careful as a cat, they’ll—”

“Oh, I see what you’re—”

“…fall right into your—”

“Shit!”

I saw what he was talking about.

Certainly the best moment of all had to be a warm, golden October afternoon with all the cherry-pickers and pin-bearings and gaskets back where they were supposed to be, neighbors on porches and front lawns pretending not to notice what was going on in the dirt lot at the end of their road.

Orville was behind the wheel, Wilbur was hovering over the open engine compartment, nose to carburetor, ear to distributor.

“Okay, turn ‘er over,” Wilbur yelled to Orville.

Orville turned the key, and…

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr,” went the Valiant.

Wilbur held up his hand immediately for Orville to stop.

He did. It took everything he had not to look up and catch the neighbors’ head-shaking and eye-rolling that had to be going on.

But Wilbur was too busy to notice. In a moment, he held up his hand and twirled his index finger in the air.

Orville turned the key again.

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr-rhur-rhur-rhur-rhr-rhr-rh-rh-r-r-r-RHOOOOMMMMM!” went the Valiant.

We had ignition! It was only for a moment, and a very rough ignition it was, the car lurching and pitching in place like a cartoon jalopy. But the engine did turn over, so we knew we’d got most everything back in its place, which to me was tantamount to squaring the circle or curing cancer.

Now I chanced a look at the neighbors. The Chinaman pretended to be going back to raking a leafless front lawn, and the two old gals who lived together at the top of the hill made like they were inspecting the roofline of their red raised-ranch cottage. The little knot of kids that had come out of somebody’s living room where they were probably watching TV were guileless in their lack of pretense.

“Run outta gas?” one of them said, as I let the engine die. “My dad said you don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a chainsaw.”

Warren signaled me to get out of the car and join him at the engine well.

“This is the part you need eyes for,” he said, handing me his homemade timing light. “I’ll crank the engine and you do what I told you.”

He got behind the wheel while I took off the distributor cap to expose the points. (Just saying these things now gives me chills of excitement.)

“Remember,” he reminded me, “you gotta hold the light steady, or it won’t strobe. Tell me when it’s doin’ that.”

“It’s doing that.”

“Okay,” he said, killing the engine and handing me the key, “get back in the car.”

I did. I turned the key, the starter motor turned the engine, the engine turned the crank shaft, the crank meshed with the universal, etc., etc., and we were off.

Several of the neighbors had overcome their skepticism and were clapping. Mac, who lived across the street and up a couple of houses from me and always seemed to be fretting about neighborhood real estate values, seemed to be crying.

As we took off down the hill I saw another “pre-owned”-type vehicle coming at us, left front fender crushed, muffler ruined, smoke billowing up behind it. It was a winding, narrow street, and when I rolled down my window my face was no more than two feet away from the other driver’s.

I smiled and said, “Hey, asshole, your rings are shot. You really should get that fixed.”

Then I sped off down the hill. Even slumped behind the wheel the guy looked pretty big.

Needs Canned Heat posters, ‘Best in West’ flyer, EGBS poster, Jimmy Reed poster (an East LA bistro. Well, Southeast LA) Something from UCLA. My grad cert? Facsimile of thong.

Attention Jason Odd. For you, now, another installment of “Country Al & Friends: John Fahey.”

I was at a party chez Barry Hansen* in Santa Monica, prob. in 1966 or ’67. My girlfriend at the time, singer Alice Gunn, was there with me. Also present, mixed in with other LA folk music luminaries, were singer-songwriter Marc Levine† and player-student John Fahey.

We were all students at UCLA in their Graduate Program of Anglo-American Folklore and Folk Music, studying our roots and staying out of Nam with student deferments. It was a rowdy, drunken soiree in a folk-music dept. grad-student way, part picking, part academic be-scene event.

I don’t know what led up to it, or what he said, but at some point in the evening Fahey began insulting Alice, who was still my girlfriend. It surprised and pissed me off, what with John and me being co-dependent with the same department for our IIs deferments.

“I think he was trying to score on her, Country,” said Barry, later.

“And she blew him off so he started potty-mouthing her, right?” I said, also later.

“No, actually, Country, I think she said ‘yes.’”

“B-But she was my girlfriend at the time!” I said, stunned.

“Hmmm,” mused Barry. “About what time was that?”

“Was what?” I said.

“When Alice was still your girlfriend.”

“Who said she was ever not my girlfriend?”

“I don’t know, Country, who?” said Barry. Barry was always the best dancer in our crowd, and his feets were sure doin’ their stuff that nite.

Anyway, all that came long after the incident. Besides, it wouldn’t have helped to know when Alice had stopped being my girlfriend at the time, because I’d been too high to know when I’d stopped being her boyfriend because I was seen hitting on—aah, forget it. All you need to know is that what I heard, courtesy provocateur extraordinaire Marc Levine, was that Fahey had profaned my girlfriend, and attention had to be paid.

I found John peeing on Barry’s front lawn and called him out on it (his raunch, not the lawn; we were already on the lawn). To my alarm, he took me up on it. Oh, shit, I remember thinking at the time. John was supposed to be a martial artist of sort, maybe Judo or very early karaoke, no one knew for sure. Plus, even tho’ he was drunk and high, like me, he was a lot bigger.

I backed out of the encounter, humiliated. A day or so later, consumed by my bad showing, I decided to do something about it.

So I enrolled in a self-defense class in UCLA Extension, determined to choose Fahey off again, but this time be ready for a fight. Btw, I am grad student at this time. Nice, huh?

Tho’ I wanted to give it a chance, the class seemed kind of silly to me. It was full of people, mostly guys and a couple of butch chicks, who looked like they’d had encounters similar to mine, i.e., gotten into situations they wished they could have handled honorably. The instructor reminded me a lot of Sergeant Bilko, tighter, but not blessed with the humor gene, or so I thought.

He started every session with us pairing off into twosomes and then having us try to take wooden clubs from each other, whom we were supposed menace with loud noises. Sometimes he also wanted us to butt each other in the head. And, for a special treat he would have us knee each other in the groin (all the guys had to wear cups. I worried about the women, as cup envy is a terrible thing).

At the end of the first day he asked for questions. I had many.

“Where are we going to find assailants that do these things, sir?” I asked.

“What things?” he said.

“Like, yell at us while they try to take our sticks, butt our heads and knee us in our cups, sir?”

“Idiot,” he said, “that’s what you’re supposed to do. They’re attacking you.”

“Do they know that? Sir?”

“Know what?”

“I mean, do they have scripts or something, sir?”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Ross, sir

Bilko: “Take a lap, Ross.” A lap was kind of serious. It was basically the cross-country course, 1.8 miles over some of the steepest Sunset Hills, around stadia, ballparks and basketball courts.

“I don’t know if I can do that, sir. I’m a heavy smoker.”

“Then take a pack of Kents with you.” Did I say the man didn’t have a sense of humor? My bad.

Now, if you were a partner who’d lost his stick, Bilko had lots of things you could do with your now-empty hands. E.g., you could clap both your adversary’s ears at the same time, as if his head were air and your palms were cymbals. Everybody liked to do this, and hated having it done to them, so much that they purposely tried to lose their sticks to opponents who didn’t want them.

So what you had was a gymful of cowards with sticks running away from other cowards without sticks clapping the air in front of them like seals. I guessed having an assailant fall down laughing in front you wasn’t the worst self-defensive measure you could take.

Then there were the “moves” all males are taught at diff. points in their lives, that were guaranteed to disarm axe-murderers, break linebackers’ necks and cause roving East LA gangs to drop to their knees and vomit uncontrollably for minutes at a time.

I always wondered, whenever the Cub Scouts, YMCA or my Hebrew teacher tried to teach me these moves, how you could get an assailant to freeze in a threatening position, or at least slow down enough so that you could plant one of your legs behind one of his and—bada bing, bada boom—leave him writhing on the ground, both arms pulled out of their shoulder sockets, until the cops came.

We also did lots of laps, which I thought was the best move Bilko gave us, because it was the most practical: most of us would probably choose flight over fight when shove came to shove no matter how good we got at stick theft.

At any rate, I graduated from the UCLA academy of self-defense, and began a series of lengthy vigils on steps of various campus bldgs Fahey and I both took classes in, until one day he came down one of them and we caught each others’ eyes.

I figured it was a moment of truth for me, altho’ I still hoped we wouldn’t get it on, since he was still bigger than me and good at Asian take-downs and breaking tiles with the edges of his hands. Maybe, I hoped, this might disqualify him from punching out with me because his mitts were considered lethal weapons and were prob. registered with the local police station. Yeah, sure.

Anyway, I tried to glare at him tho the best I could muster was something like a yeshiva-bucher frown. I didn’t know how he’d react to this. Shit, I didn’t even know if he knew I’d been in deep training for a rematch he prob. didn’t know had been booked. Maybe he didn’t see me, after all. But I told myself to be ready for anything, as my self-defense master had instructed me to do. Still, I found myself thinking about laps, and how good one of them looked right then.

As it turned out, I did catch his eye. But, to my supreme surprise and relief, he seemed to sink into a slump almost as soon as he saw me. He took what looked like a big breath, exhaled and walked, tearfully, over to where I was standing, without a scintilla of menace, shaking his head, holding out both hands, preparatory, as it turned out, to hugging me.

He told me, in mid-embrace, how terrible he’d felt about what he’d said that nite to Alice, how he’d heard about my self-defense class, felt shitty about that but had just never got around to apologizing for causing it. Now he was blubbering mea culpas all over the place, insisting we have coffee laced with Southern Comfort together in the student lounge [him providing the sauce, which he carried around in a briefcase (I carried pot in mine). Ah, the ‘Sixties].

Over coffee and Comfort he insisted on arranging to tie a rawhide thong like the one he, Al Wilson and Henry Vestine (Canned Heat guitarists-singers) wore around their wrists, in a secret ceremony he performed for only his very closest friend. How could I say no, especially since I was soon bawling, too, professing my brotherly love for him and the musicians—Bukka White, Charley Patton and Son House—we’d all come to know about and love, largely thanks to his research and sleuthing.

It was all a little strange, but I was OK with the outcome, and I do think it gave him some small relief that a wrong in his life had been righted. We walked to the Student Union together, talking about the Folklore Dept’s Chairman, D.K. Wilgus’ most recent whisky binge and bad-mouthing Mark Levine, who we both agreed provoked the incident in the first place.

BTW, I did indeed let him tie a thong around my wrist in a private, but not very arcane, ceremony, held at his house in, I think, Venice. I was never sure exactly what the thong signified, but I think it had something to do with sincerity, brotherhood and Delta Blues. That would make sense.

——————————————————————

*Barry was to make his bones a few years later as Doctor Demento. His dump at the time this story unfolds was home to more blues, R&B, Rock, race, minstrel, folk etc., etc. records than I’d ever seen before, except at blues scholar Bob Hite’s place. Bob, as you remember, was the eventual co-founder and leader of Canned Heat. He’s kind of important in my own musical journey, because he took an interest in my band, Evergreen Blueshoes, q.v. in other posts in this blog, and got us into the Topanga Corral, thus launching our meteoric rise to the lower levels of public consciousness in 1968 and ‘69.

† I settled my hash with Levine, too, but somewhat later; in fact, later enough that I felt comfortable recording one of his songs, [Amsterdam-link here], with the Blueshoes.

-30-

—————— * —————— * ———————

Yes, Jason, this all really happened, was what the Episcopalians call “a true saying,” and pretty much the way I set it down here, which took a little longer than I thought it would, what with my psychological insights and everything. I mention this because I have more Fahey stories, and I thought I was going to get to some of them now for you. They’ll have to wait, but there’s no reason I can’t tease you a little bit now:

“How John Fahey Embarrassed the UCLA Folklore Dept. by Getting One of the Earliest M.A.’s They Ever Awarded” (he was a known freak and druggie, remember).

“How John Fahey Got Hisself 86’d from Eagle Music Shop at the Ash Grove When He Said ‘This guitar sucks,’ to a Lady Who Was About to Buy it for Her Son.” It was the first time many of us had ever heard the term.

“Ash Grove Perennial Dave Cohen Wins $10 Bet with John Fahey that He Could Convincingly Imitate Fahey’s Unique Guitar Style, on Stage, in a Live Performance, with no Preparation at all.” Fahey paid off because even he was convinced Cohen had somehow copped his technique. Cohen was a master technician. He could imitate almost any guitarist, tho’ he usually missed their essence.

Written, but not hardly edited.

Jason, following is the indulgence I give myself to publish short stories that will otherwise never see the light of day. You needn’t concern yourself with them, unless you want to. For the record, I’m proud of them & think they should be published.

From the [proposed] book Growing Up Jewish in L.A.

THE SUMMER I REBUILT THE VALIANT

Allan P. Ross

“Hey, asshole, get off the road, your rings are shot!” were the actual words the biker used to convince me to rebuild my 1961 Plymouth Valiant. I know that sounds like a pretty big cave-in on my part, but he was a pretty big biker.

He’d been eating my smoke all the way down spiritual, twisting Laurel Canyon Road until he could pass me, which he did just above Sunset Boulevard, yelling and snarling and giving me the finger. I was lucky he wasn’t a Hell’s Angel. I considered it an omen.

My life right then was at a low-water mark. My ladylove (and partner in a house we’d bought together in the Hollywood Hills) had left me, my rock career had tanked, my bank account was empty. My student deferment was the only thing keeping me out of Viet Nam, and that was about to end.

But until it did I had to keep driving the ‘61 Bermuda Blue Valiant with the maroon driver’s-side replacement-door and roped-down hood. It had over 100,000 miles on it, had never been serviced and smoking was not its worst habit, by far.

Nothing sucks like driving a car that is both unchic and decrepit in L.A. But since I couldn’t afford new wheels I had to do something about the Valiant. The problem was I knew nothing about cars and car repair. I was a member of a sub-section of the population not known for caring how things work or keeping them working: male, pre-law, Jewish.

And yet I wanted to do this, i.e., rebuild the Plymouth. And it was not just because I needed transportation. I wanted to be able to say things like, “Your exhaust manifold is loose,” or, “You’ll need a cherry-picker to get that engine outta there,” and know what I just said. I hated being dissed on the road and not understanding the insult. Worse, I am a hothead, and I hated not knowing what to say back.

I had a resource. Warren. Warren was a retired “salt,” an ex-Army tank driver, construction worker, machinist, gandy dancer, jobs that require using one’s back and hands. Which is not to say Warren hadn’t learned to use his head, too.

In fact, I know he thought of himself as a mind- over-muscles kind of guy. Whenever he’d hear me grunt with strain he’d look at whatever I was doing, bray like a mule, and say, “Muscles are for dummies.”

Not that he didn’t have them. Muscles, I mean. Warren was built like an old-fashioned fullback: thick, sinewy ropes connected his head to his body so that his upper limbs seemed to start at his neck. Popeye forearms and powerful hands spoke of years of picks and sledgehammers swung in short arcs, as is necessary in mining and railroad-tie spike-driving. I once asked him if he’d played football in school.

“Well, since they didn’t have no organized teams until the sixth grade, I guess not,” he’d answered.

In spite of his curtailed education he was a current events freak and had been one for so long he could probably qualify as a history freak, too. The small shack he shared with his wife across the road and down in a gully was bursting with books, newspapers, periodicals and any other non-fiction media he could lay his hands on.

“I was a Wobbly before the Russian Revolution,” he told me, fishing through his wallet and proudly showing me his I.W.W. card.

I’d never met a Wobbly, an Industrial Worker of the World, before, and I was impressed.

“Took some balls to join, didn’t it?” I asked.

He shrugged, but I could tell he was surprised I even what he was talking about. His blue eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his “seein’” glasses (he had another pair, very dark, that he couldn’t see out of; Warren was legally blind) and he sucked in the little rivulet of saliva that would always form at the corner of his mouth whenever he got excited.

“For a while there, we had enough members to scare the life outta those sumbitches up in Washington,” he said, winking at me conspiratorially, “you bet we did.

“But I unjoined when Comrade Lenin and Comrade Trotsky took over and tried to get our union to become Bolsheviks. I could see where that was goin’ and I didn’t want any part of it.”

He reminded me a little of Harry Truman right then. He had the clean, square lines of Truman’s face, and his rimless “seein’” glasses focused the sunlight into bright patches under his eyes, just as “Give-’em-Hell” Harry’s did.

“Nosiree. That’s where I disagreed with Big Bill Haywood. He was the Union’s leader, y’see. ‘No sir,’ I told him, ‘you can be a free-thinker and still be an American.’ That’s what I said then, and it’s what I say now.”

He also said he’d be glad to help me with the Valiant, but that I shouldn’t be surprised if it needed to be, well, rebuilt.

I was ecstatic. Up until then I had avoided even using the word, let alone bringing it into a sentence that included me and the Valiant. I half-wished the biker were there, so I could say something like, “It’s not the rings, dickhead, it’s the rocker arm panel (I’d seen that parts description once, by accident), so we’re gonna rebuild the engine.”

And so, one hazy L.A. morning, we parked the Valiant in the dirt field next to my house, jacked it up and put it on blocks (wooden blocks, because concrete blocks can break while you’re under the car, and then you’re just another chuckling auto shop teacher’s story about someone who didn’t take his course).

You could almost hear the neighbors groan when they saw all four wheels of the car leave the ground, because they also knew that moody, Jewish, pre-law draft-dodgers weren’t likely to be handy with tools, and cars up on blocks in front yards may be fine in Georgia and Mississippi but not in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles. I am sure they prayed every night for Warren’s continued robust health.

You’ve got to understand one or two things about Warren: As I said, he was almost blind. Also, because of some speech impediment or habit, he talked a little like Walt Disney’s Goofy. What he said was almost always clever, but the presentation was sometimes a little comical.

It also may help to understand that I was, as I have said, a monumental hothead with a quick temper and a big mouth, “full of sound and fury, etc.,” but full of shit.

So, what the engine-rebuilding process might have looked and sounded like to the casual observer was Goofy the Dog telling Donald Duck how to build a spaceship.

But the partnership worked, and Warren and I became good friends as a result.

Warren would sit ramrod straight in a kitchen chair that I would set next to the part of the car I was working on, and say things like, “That hose is going to be held onto the pipe with either a spring clamp or a screw clamp. Which one is it?”

“I don’t know,” I’d probably say.

Then he’d say, “It’s a spring clamp; even you would recognize a screw clamp.”

Then we’d go across the street and down into his gully to a rusted-out 1932 Model-A Ford that served as his toolbox, to get a special pliers for removing spring clamps.

This process took time, but I had plenty of that. Also, it was entertaining. For one thing, the tool we’d be looking for almost always came with a story.

“I got these pliers when I was pouring cement for FDR’s Redwood City aqueduct,” is the one that came with the spring-clamp pliers.

“Now, Franklin Roosevelt,” Warren said, looking up from his rummaging, “he was sly dog. He never let the right hand know what the left was doing. The Redwood City dam wasn’t built anywhere near Redwood City, y’know. It was built in Wyoming, a thousand miles away.

“Old Roosevelt, see, he couldn’t get Congress to give him the money for the project in Wyoming—people were still bitching about Teapot Dome; you know what that was, don’t you?—so he renamed the project for Redwood City, in Oregon, raised the money and built the dam in Wyoming.

“Here it is,” he said, holding up the spring-clamp pliers and cackling with glee over FDR’s little hijinx.

Another thing: finding and using special tools for special tasks turned out to be a real confidence builder for me, because it made so many more jobs do-able.

But mainly, special tools brought me closer and closer to the amorphous fraternity of people who can do things with their hands. I loved being able to say, “I think we’ll need a half-to-quarter-inch swivel-drive to get to that tie-rod,” and know what I was talking about.

One day, when the last mount bolt was finally off, and the engine had been pared down to just the naked block sitting inside the motor well, I actually heard myself say to Warren, “We’re gonna need a cherry-picker to get that sucker outta there.” What a moment.

There were other, slightly less glorious moments.

There was putting the water pump back on without a gasket, thereby inventing the first self-contained, under-the-hood, high-pressure car wash.

And then there was the great Pin-bearing Panic of ‘69, performed in front of a live audience at sunset, Warren sitting on my lime-green kitchen chair next to the rear fender, me under the back axle, proudly removing the universal-joint while several of my friends watched.

“Arnie, now, you gotta be real careful when you get the plate off the joint; you don’t want to drop those pin-bearings,” Warren said, in a loud, clear voice.

“What are pin-bearings?” I said back.

“Well, they’re right under the plate you’re taking off. They’ll look like a row o’ needles, but they’re just stuck in there with grease, so if you’re not careful as a cat, they’ll—”

“Oh, I see what you’re—”

“…fall right into your—”

“Shit!”

I saw what he was talking about.

Certainly the best moment of all had to be a warm, golden October afternoon with all the cherry-pickers and pin-bearings and gaskets back where they were supposed to be, neighbors on porches and front lawns pretending not to notice what was going on in the dirt lot at the end of their road.

Orville was behind the wheel, Wilbur was hovering over the open engine compartment, nose to carburetor, ear to distributor.

“Okay, turn ‘er over,” Wilbur yelled to Orville.

Orville turned the key, and…

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr,” went the Valiant.

Wilbur held up his hand immediately for Orville to stop.

He did. It took everything he had not to look up and catch the neighbors’ head-shaking and eye-rolling that had to be going on.

But Wilbur was too busy to notice. In a moment, he held up his hand and twirled his index finger in the air.

Orville turned the key again.

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr-rhur-rhur-rhur-rhr-rhr-rh-rh-r-r-r-RHOOOOMMMMM!” went the Valiant.

We had ignition! It was only for a moment, and a very rough ignition it was, the car lurching and pitching in place like a cartoon jalopy. But the engine did turn over, so we knew we’d got most everything back in its place, which to me was tantamount to squaring the circle or curing cancer.

Now I chanced a look at the neighbors. The Chinaman pretended to be going back to raking a leafless front lawn, and the two old gals who lived together at the top of the hill made like they were inspecting the roofline of their red raised-ranch cottage. The little knot of kids that had come out of somebody’s living room where they were probably watching TV were guileless in their lack of pretense.

“Run outta gas?” one of them said, as I let the engine die. “My dad said you don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a chainsaw.”

Warren signaled me to get out of the car and join him at the engine well.

“This is the part you need eyes for,” he said, handing me his homemade timing light. “I’ll crank the engine and you do what I told you.”

He got behind the wheel while I took off the distributor cap to expose the points. (Just saying these things now gives me chills of excitement.)

“Remember,” he reminded me, “you gotta hold the light steady, or it won’t strobe. Tell me when it’s doin’ that.”

“It’s doing that.”

“Okay,” he said, killing the engine and handing me the key, “get back in the car.”

I did. I turned the key, the starter motor turned the engine, the engine turned the crank shaft, the crank meshed with the universal, etc., etc., and we were off.

Several of the neighbors had overcome their skepticism and were clapping. Mac, who lived across the street and up a couple of houses from me and always seemed to be fretting about neighborhood real estate values, seemed to be crying.

As we took off down the hill I saw another “pre-owned”-type vehicle coming at us, left front fender crushed, muffler ruined, smoke billowing up behind it. It was a winding, narrow street, and when I rolled down my window my face was no more than two feet away from the other driver’s.

I smiled and said, “Hey, asshole, your rings are shot. You really should get that fixed.”

Then I sped off down the hill. Even slumped behind the wheel the guy looked pretty big.

Jason Odd asks if I know of any live Ridgerunners tapes orbiting about out there that he could get ahold of  (btw, Jason, let me know something about you so I can share you with the rest of us arcane esotericists).

The Ridgerunners, you may recall, was a Bluegrass band out of Berkeley, Ca, formed in 1962 by singer-mandolin wiz  Scott Hambly, banjo player Greg Lasser and YT, Guitarist Country Al Ross (sometimes spelled “Rosenberg”. ) It’s us three that you see in the two cuts here hyping an appearance we made at the Bear’s Lair, Cal’s Student Union which morphed into a cabaret on weekends.

As far as live Ridgerunners tapes go,  Jason, the only one I have is  of  a  show that  Folk Music/Sociologist Rolf Kahn did on us on KPFK in Berkeley, also in ‘62. The fidelity sux, but the passion and spirit are there,  as evidenced-and I hope most of you agree-by this treatment of the Bill Monroe  chestnut,  Molly and Tenbrooks. It takes a short time to load, but it’s worth the wait.

For you serious collectors I prob. could make the whole half-hour show available to you, tho’ not for free. Ditto a show with Scott playing mandolin and singing with the Kentucky Colonels, same era.  But for now, take a listen to Scott’s vocal here, on Molly. The banjo pickin’ ain’t too shabby, either. Remember, this is 1962, and the personnel are three college dweebs who prob. thought the Mason-Dixon Line was a fraternity pick-up spiel.

Thanks for your interest, Jason.

And now,  the final installment of my own personal account of Yugoslavian Sturm und Drang…

The Sveta Mariĉ Award
by Allan P. Ross

Installment 3 of 3.

[In the last installment I was appealing to a translator who was supposed t0 be helping me with a Serbian accordion player who'd suddenly became paranoid about political assassins and was refusing to show up for a film recording date I'd hired him to do.]

“Can’t you help me? I mean, can’t you get him to realize there’s no danger rehearsing folk music in the Hollywood hills?”

“But that seems to be just the problem, my friend,” the owner said. “He thinks there are Partisans wherever there are hills. He is not worried about the recording session, in a big, glamorous, well-lit studio on Sunset Blvd. It is rehearsing in the hills that he fears.”

The little hatch snapped open again, as if whoever was behind it had been listening to the conversation. There was a loud hissing and spitting sound behind it, and the owner excused himself from his conversation with me to confer again with Sveta. Again, the sibilant exchange. Again, the owner walking down the three steps to confide in me.

“Sveta says if he can see the music now, he won’t need to rehearse.”

I looked at the owner. “But I need him to help me write it. And I thought he couldn’t read music.”

“Oh, he can read, all right,” the owner said. “He just doesn’t want anyone to know it. He feels it detracts from the, how do you say–”

Now there came an even louder hissing from the little hatch in the door. The owner listened, then continued.

“–primal authenticity of the music,” he explained, “its earthy spontaneity, its–”

“Okay, okay,” I said, “I get it.”

I had the music with me, the conductor’s score, and I went back to my car to get it. I figured I’d call Sveta’s bluff. But when I came back, Sveta refused to open the door. “How can I show him the music?” I said to my two companions.

There was another exchange of hisses. Then, from the owner, “Hold the musical score up to the door.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “What’s he going to do, mental it through an inch and a half of oak?”

“No, no,” the owner said. “Hold it up to the peephole. He can see it that way.”

I began to understand why history teachers always tell you “You can’t study Yugoslavia, it’s too complicated. All you have to know is, when Marshall Tito dies the Balkans will fall apart.” For the first time in my life I began to feel bad for Marshall Tito.

My patience was growing short, and I knew a house of mirrors when I was caught in one. But I’d come this far and I figured I might as well see the thing through.

I went to the door and held the score up to the peephole.

Sveta said something, and the owner told me to hold the music even closer, and to stand to the side of it, as I was blocking the porch light, which the accordionist needed in order to see the music. I felt like an idiot, but I did what he said.

Sveta spoke again, and so did the owner.

“Closer,” he said. Now the score was right up against the peephole. I started to pull a face to make it clear that I really wasn’t falling for any of this crap and that we’d all be getting back in the car and leaving in–

“KAH-WWWHHHUUMMPPP!!” went an explosion so close to my head I thought it was inside it. So close, in fact, I didn’t know which way to dive, because it so completely filled the space in the universe that, up until then, I thought I alone filled, that anywhere I jumped would just be another place where the explosion was, so why bother?

So I just stood there, ears ringing, holding up this musical score with a big, shredded hole in the middle of it and the barrel of a 38 revolver poking through it. I have a feeling I looked like someone in a newspaper photo with a caption reading, “Found Wandering in Subway After Bender,” or something like that.

Both my companions had hit the dirt and stayed there for some time. Finally, the restaurant owner looked up and said something like, “Perhaps this isn’t a good time for Sveta.”

My dancing friend agreed, and the three of us walked, double-time, close-order drill, across a little alleyway that led to a side entrance of the complex not visible to the bungalows in the rear.

I was petrified and still could not hear a thing. Stuart had to drive my car, a broken down stick shift Plymouth which he mastered in seconds.

For the recording session I got another accordionist, not a button player, but a traditional keyboard accordionist, and told him to play “Lady of Spain” using just the black keys. It sounded fine.

I don’t know what happened to Sveta Marič, if the Partisans got him or what. I never went back to the restaurant. I guess I’d had enough of Yugoslavian politics.

“Anyway,” I told George, returning to his question and the reason for his phone call, “that’s the story of Sveta Marič and the Sveta Mariĉ Award. But, like I say, nobody really knows what it means or what it’s for, and I think your winning it would make a wonderful ‘bullet’ on your résumé.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?” George said.

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “The award comes with a certificate, you know.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “Besides, I’m seeing the newspaper guy tomorrow. I just wanted to know if I could put down your name as a reference.” Then, after a slight pause, “What kind of a certificate?”

“Very handsome,” I said. “Stiff, pale parchment, Gothic lettering, your name embossed in gold type, the whole enchilada.”

“But I would need it by tomorrow,” he repeated. “How could I–”

“No problem,” I said, interrupting him. “Go to the stationery store, get a piece of pale parchment, have your wife hold it high in the air. You own a .38 revolver, don’t you?” But he’d hung up the phone by then.

I don’t know whether or not he got the job, but I imagine he won’t be bothering me to co-write any screenplays with him for a while.

Actually, I’m a little surprised George still buys my cover. Most of my friends don’t any more. It’s hard to be considered a serious screen writer when you live in Ames, Iowa. Harder yet to recruit Partisans. No hills.

Now, where’d I put that black ski mask? I got a meeting tonight.

© ALLAN P. ROSS, WACCABUC, NY.

In other news…I’m posting Part Two of the “Sveta Maric Award,” a (somewhat) true accounting of weird recording session I had 40 yrs ago, in which Ry Cooder was going to play till I blew it with him [See Ry Cooder and My Copper Mine Blues on this Blog].

The Sveta Mariĉ Award

by Allan P. Ross

Part Two of Three Parts

[The guy was pure fire]. He played the button accordion like Frank Yankovic possessed, punching out the darkly driving notes of the Yugoslavian scale like bullets from an AK-47.

And he had the look. Not that it mattered, because it was a film score and nobody watching the film would ever see him. But boy, did he have the look.

He was a classic, media-perfect Yugoslavian: thick, steel-gray hair pompadoured above a handsome, square face, “would-I-lie” eyes, and boxy torso preceding the rest of his body when he walked. You really could picture this guy in a hunting jacket with a shotgun draped across one arm and Joseph Stalin standing next to him, smiling uncomfortably.

My friend, the folk dancer, introduced us after the set, and I asked Sveta if he was interested in the job. He not only was interested, but he took me into his dressing room where he showed me his entire scrapbook, which consisted mainly of pictures of him and Zsa Zsa Gabor taken during a guest spot she’d done on Johnny Carson years before.

We agreed to meet at my place two nights from then for a collaboration-rehearsal, since I had to learn how to make his sound fit with everyone else’s. I gave him my address and he said he’d be there early to welcome the other players and “wake up” his fingers. I stayed for one more set, marveling at the dazzling, masculine beauty of his playing–part Gypsy, part Mosque chant, part Portuguese fado, part polka.

The night of the rehearsal came, the other musicians showed, but not Sveta Marič. The rest of us went over the material, mentally fitting in the accordion parts wherever they occurred, me hoping he’d show at any minute with a good excuse. But by eleven that night it was clear he wasn’t coming.

I called his house several times but got no answer. The next night I went back to Club Slav, where I’d met him. No, I was told, no one had seen him since the night I was there, and no, he’d never disappeared before, although there seemed to be some disagreement about that.

Stuart, my folk dancer friend, who’d been coming to the club for years, asked the owner for Sveta’s address. The owner was adamant about respecting his employee’s privacy, but a ten-dollar bill broke that silence.

The address was in a run-down part of Hollywood my friend and I knew well. I thought we should go there immediately, and I said so in front of the owner.

“Good idea,” said the owner. “You speak Serbian, of course.”

I looked at him. “Why do I have to speak Serbian?” I asked. “The guy spoke fine English when I talked to him the other night.”

The owner’s eyes went up, the corners of his mouth went down, and he shrugged. “Fine,” he said, and started to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “When do you get off?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I have to close tonight.

“Don’t you have an assistant?”

“Yes, but I’d have to pay him to close up for me.”

“How much?” I asked. I had my wallet out again.

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” he said.

I thrust a twenty at him.

“I’ll get my coat,” he said.

Sveta Marič lived in one of those six-unit courts they must have built a million of in Hollywood in the ’20’s, two attached bungalows on either side of a narrow walkway, two more bungalows at the end of the walkway. Sveta lived in one of the bungalows at the end.

All the shades in his unit were drawn. The place was dark but not black. It looked as if there was one light burning behind the curling, tattered shade covering the front window, and there wasn’t about the place the abject stillness of honest-to-God vacancy.

I knocked. There was no formal response, but I had the feeling the apartment was suddenly all raw nerve-endings, its occupant ready for fight or flight at any moment.

I knocked again. Nothing. I looked into the little door-in-a-door, a two-by-four-inch peephole all California doors came with if they’d been built before the Watts Riots. I saw nothing but the little hatch on the other side of the rectangle, closed against intruders like myself. “Sveta?” I called quietly. “Sveta, this is Al, the guy that wanted you to play on his–”

I didn’t get to finish. The little hatch snapped open and a harsh whisper, redolent of too many Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and slivovitz, rasped out words I couldn’t understand. I looked at the restaurant owner, who was standing at the foot of the porch inspecting his nails in the porch light. If ever a look said “You need me,” his did.

He walked up the steps, tapped lightly on the door, hissed some words that reminded me of the Polish my father and grandmother used to use when they didn’t want me to understand something. In a second he came back down the stairs and addressed me in a confidential manner, looking both ways before he spoke.

“He’s afraid of Partisans,” the owner said.

I just looked at him. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What Partisans? From where?”

“That’s the problem,” the owner said. “He doesn’t know. They could be from anywhere. That is the nature of Yugoslavian politics, my friend.”

“But why didn’t he say something the other night?” I asked.

“Maybe something has happened since the other night,” said the owner.

“What?” I said, probably a bit more irritably than I’d meant to. “I mean, you’re Yugoslavian, aren’t you?”

“Serbian, just like Sveta,” he said, puffing up.

“Well, then, you must know what he’s afraid of.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said the owner. “He comes from Trebonicza. I come from Saloniev.”

I looked at my kolo dancer friend.

“They’re about eight miles away from each other. About a twelve-minute drive,” he said.

I looked at the owner.

He held up his hands. “Yugoslavian politics,” he said.