In her post Meet up madness, Spiderleaf described the social aspects of our excellent adventure on Long Island this weekend very well. Our excellent adventure at a BLUES festival. (More on that later.) As has been the case the few other times that I have managed to hook up in person with fellow denizens of blogworld, I met good-hearted, intelligent people who I am proud to consider as friends.
I could only make this a day trip, because I had a very taxing job the next day and knew that if I stayed, I too would have had the pleasure of experiencing that 400 pound head so nicely referenced by supersoling.
But I learned something on the trip. The WHOLE trip.
And here it is.
You CAN go home again.
You just have to survive long enough for “home” to catch up with you.
Read on:
You see…I am FROM Long Island, as are my ancestors on my father’s side of the family. They settled Long Island starting in the mid 1600s. Pioneers, working class people, farmers and fishermen mostly. They are the “townies” who were there when the great migration out of the city started after W.W.II, and to a great degree they have STAYED townies. They comprise the working infrastucture of the middle class/upper middle class boom that has turned much of Long Island into one giant bedroom suburb of New York. But that bedroom suburb only extends about one hour’s commute outside of NYC, and down the middle of the island, (which means all of it except the resort areas and prime waterfront villages) something very interesting has happened. I first noticed this in the late ’70s/early ’80s, when the Hispanic diaspora out of New York began to happen in earnest. Long Island has become a multi-cultural, multi-racial, working class paradise of sorts.
When I came up there in the ’50s + early ’60s, most of suburban Long Island was a lockstep, ticky-tacky houses hell of fear-driven middle class wannabe whiteness. The ESSENCE of the post-war safety years, all white ethnic Brooklyn and Bronx refugees trying to stop being Italian, Irish and Jewish on the G.I. bill, with small areas of people of color tentatively attached to the dominant villages as convenient reservoirs of badly paid manual labor. And after you reached the “too long a commute” line, it became basically Ku Klux Klan territory. The original settlers…many of my relatives included…holding the line against the 20th century with everything they had.
OK. I was blessed with the divine accident of jazz at about 14 years of age, and consequently got the hell out of there as fast as my feets would do their stuff.
I’ll tell you how segregated Long Island was. Curly, who was with ask at the festival, grew up in the lovely town of Westbury. L. I., somewhere around the same time that I lived on the other side of the island. There was a jazz club in Westbury….a REAL jazz club, as in Coltrane, Monk, Kenton, Maynard Ferguson and Miles…called the Cork ‘n Bib. It was my home and solace throughout my late teens and early 20s, a place where I really began to learn my craft in weeknight jam sessions and rehearsals, a place where the true artist/revolutionaries of America at that time felt welcomed. Curly was in Westbury then, a smart young woman I am sure, from a good family, going through a good school system in an upper middle class white suburb.
She had no idea that the place even EXISTED. It was so out that no one saw it. Right smack in the middle of the main shopping street of the town. I have had other white residents of Westbury tell me the same thing.
And with the sole exception of The Cork ‘n Bib, the only non-orchestral, truly American music that you could find the length and breadth of Long island except for some clubs in its mini-ghettos was in the hard core rock ‘n roll bars.
BLUES?
On LONG ISLAND?
Fuggedaboudit!!!
Jazz?
I had to go into NYC and find these hole in the wall basement record stores to find Bird records. 20 years after the beboppers absolutely revolutionized ALL of American music.
Find a white man and a black man talking as true social equals in public? Never, damned near.
Never.
Employer and employee.
Master and servant.
Like I said…I left as fast as I could. And my family left soon after. So I have had little or no contact with real Long Island in the ensuing 30 years or so.
Took the train out Saturday. An easy two hour train ride to Riverhead, the county seat of Suffolk County…the less developed, easternmost Long Island county. I didn’t really know what to expect at a Long Island blues festival. The whole idea didn’t quite compute, but I needed to get away from my work for a quick minute and decompress, had no particular social or work plans for that day, and as I said I have greatly enjoyed my previous few experiences with fellow bloggers.
As the train moved out Island, about an hour into the trip I began to notice how rural the middle part of the island had remained. How like time travel it seemed. Where today there are neighborhoods of multi-million dollar mansions and upscale shopping areas (Woodmere, the Five Towns area), when I was a boy in the ’50s I rode horses through the woods behind my grandfather’s working stable and barnyard.
And that life still exists outside of little towns with names like Yaphank and Selden, further east on Long Island. I could SEE it from the train.
Horses, forests, farms, swamps. The works.
So I arrived in Riverhead, and except for the looks of the parked cars, it felt as if I fallen into a scene from Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha county. Some deep south, half abandoned sleepy county seat in the late Saturday morning summer sun. A seemingly abandoned “Supreme Court” building in serious need of cleaning, a few frame houses with lawyers’ shingles on their front lawns, some long-unused old Long Island Railroad cars on a dusty siding…
Time travel.
But as I walked into the middle of the town proper…maybe 6 blocks of stores and restaurants…things began to start to look more contemporary. First of all, many of the stores were Spanish. Mexican/Central American. As were the majority of the few people on the street at that relatively early Saturday hour.
And then I heard the music.
Real blues. 11AM on a hot summer Saturday in rural Long Island, and there’s somebody playing Howling Wolf!!??? Loud? In the middle of a giant parking lot by the little river that gives the town its name? Walking down a suburban-looking street surrounded by Mexican mommies and daddies and their kids out for a day-off morning stroll to go score for some huevos rancheros for breakfast?
Serious cultural disconnect. BIG time.
Let’s get lost.
And it got better as the day wore on.
Now the first band I heard was truly amazing. Jim Vicino and the Smackdaddies. No fooling. That was the name. Just three musicians. Two biker-looking guys in greasy looking black leather motorcycle cowboy outfits (one guitar player/blues singer and one bass player) and a drummer who looked like an ex pro-wrestler gone to fat. On a stage in this big parking lot that is rapidly filling up with…with people who look like my father’s family. Working class Long Island whites. And working class Long Island blacks, too. (Not so many Hispanics. The blues ain’t, in their culture. Got their OWN blues.) Out for the day, with their folding chairs and sitting blankets. To hear some blues and party. Barbecue vendors and Italian sausage stands, beer tents, carny games, people selling arts and crafts…it’s all filling up.
And…it is grooving.
Not to some pallid imitation of “the blues”. But to a true American underground genius who probably makes his living driving a truck or doing construction work and plays nights in tough bars for tough money. Dressed in his leathers, and ABSOLUTELY ON POINT with every note he sings and plays. Understands Son House, understands Robert Johnson, understands Chicago blues and Memphis blues and Delta blues. Picked up one guitar after another and sang his ASS off. Drummer and bass player right there with him, solid and strong. I’m telling you, I stood there in the sun with tears in my eyes. I had to call up a couple of musician friends in the city and have them hear what this guy was doing over the phone. And the audience was right there with him.
Unbelievable. I am in the business of understanding and continuing American musical forms as functioning, burning, living entities rather than as museum pieces, and here these guys were doing exactly the same thing before noon on a hot day in rural Long Island with an audience that was as good or better than anything ANY of us ever experience.
Miracle time.
They were the high point of the day musically…no doubt dissed by being put on first because they were not “show biz” enough..but what followed was by no means bad, either. Band after band…some quite elaborate, with horn sections and good James Brown arrangements, some little more than professional wedding bands who could also play some rock ‘n roll/blues. But the party was ON.
And it was healthy.
It was multi-cultural and multi-racial.
It wasn’t self-consciously artsy. “Oh LOOK, Muffy!!! The BLUES!!!” It was drinking beer…GOOD beer, mostly…and eating tasty food.
And it was BURNING!!!
It struck me over and over again…THIS is where America really lives today. Just as it always has. Only better. The civil rights movement DID work. Sure some of the people there would kick your ass up and down the street if you tried to talk politics with them, and sure some of them have severe media habits.
But they can BURN!!!
And that has ALWAYS been America’s real strength.
They can burn, and when pushed hard enough, “Don’t tread on me” is not just some slogan to them.
And I saw signs…
I saw signs…
I saw signs that something is happening.
Something uniquely American is waking up.
Again.
I saw it in the way people carried themselves. The way they talked across culture gaps to one another. The way the workers in the food concessions laughed when you talked to them with some respect. The way the totally racially mixed police force and firemen/EMS workers acted in their roles. They were SO comfortable. Wasn’t any thing but a GROOVE thing going on.
And the beat continued.
I saw it when some festival organizer got up on stage and made a little speech recognizing various bigwigs and hustlers who were there to dip their beaks however much they could in the power that existed on that parking lot. He said a few names, then made some lame joke about “Why…these are all DEMOCRATS!!! Where are all my good REPUBLICAN friends?” and the boos started to rain down on him at the very WORD “Republican.”
“Boooo!!! Boooo!!!” Just a few seconds of it…enough for him to know that he had blown it, after which he quickly got off stage and the music started again.
I saw it in the plastic looking Nassau County Democrat Commissioner of Whatever who is trying to convince someone (ANYONE) that he is a serious candidate for Governor in his Brooks Brothers rolled just so button down striped red and white dress shirt open at the neck and his $300 haircut standing there surrounded by several nearly comatose campaign workers holding a few “Whoever for Governor” signs and futilely trying to push campaign literature into the hands of a totally disinterested crowd.
“Who’s THAT square? Oh. Just another lost politician. Yawn.”
I saw things.
Young and old, black and white, male and female.
Just THERE.
Being Americans.
REAL Americans.
I have said in many posts that I believe that the primary reason we defeated Hitler and became the dominant culture of the rest of the world in the post-W.W.II years was because we could swing.
Swing and laugh.
Jazz and American comedy won that war.
Count Basie and Bugs Bunny. I can’t prove this to be true, but then…you can’t prove it NOT to be true either.
And what I saw this Saturday…something that I was beginning to disbelieve…is that we can STILL swing.
AND laugh.
It is SPIRIT that wins wars.
Not politics, not ideas, and not weapons either. ANY fool can make a weapon, and any fool can talk a WHOLE lot of people into lockstepping in on behind him for the love and promise of power over others.
But when that kind of movement meets a people who can still swing? Can still feel?
No contest.
Well…SOME contest, but I know on which side MY bets will be placed, and my momma didn’t raise no fools.
Don’t tread on me America is not dead yet. Not by a long shot. Hard to see it behind all the plastic malls and virtual media…Joe Bageant’s social hologram…but it’s there.
And it is growing restive.
I do not know when or where or how, but it is going to raise its head eventually.
And it is going to say:
Bet on it.
And…keep the faith.
Later…
AG
P.S. My grandfather…the REAL Arthur Gilroy…was a fairly small man. A BAD little man in his youth, or so I have been told. And he told me over and over. “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
Yup.
THIS dog’s got some fight left in it. This American dog.
On the evidence.
Watch.
