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Book 1. En Nueva York, 1957…
Book 1. En Nueva York, 1957.
As noted once and said twice, we would learn a great deal in Far Rockaway, New York, USA in the winter, spring, summer and fall, of 1957.
Right from the beginning, the music meant almost everything and was somehow more real than the reality that it was sound tracking, Gale and I went back to school to discover that we might as well have been studying moon rocks on Mars for all our previous book, (and lack of book,) larnin’ had to do with the New York City Public School curriculum.
The flash back was to sitting in La Escuela de San Juan Bautista where no one spoke a lick a da lingo (English) and I didn’t speak a lick a la lingua (Spanish) only this time we were able to comprende the sniddy snoody and snide comments made about our pathetic fraternal idiocy.
The only saving grace for me came in the person of a Puerto Rican kid whose command of English began and ended with a fruit salad of four letter words like you’ve never heard. It was fantastic. This angel faced boy knew nothing but cuss words and creative combinations of cuss words presented so fluently and floridly inappropriately that I’m certain that we today, would have an entire field of scatological study devoted to and franticly seeking the cure for FFFWS (Flagrantly Floridly Filthy Word Syndrome) it was amazing.
Anyway, I was able to demonstrate a smidge-lit of intelligence by virtue of the fact that I was the only person in the entire school able to translate his linguistic intentions (though there is the small possibility that I may have inadvertently taken too broad a horizon or perhaps one too many small liberties with my interpretations and translations, but only to demonstrate my own facility with multi-syllabic language, in the hope that they (the school) would realize the kind of intellects that they were too quickly dismissing as “the gang of three ..Idiots”.
He really was a sweet sincere kid who had more than likely been victimized by a psycho Tio (uncle) with his own hysterical but cruel agenda for getting even with all the school Marms and Principals in the New York City Public School system, and boy if his intention was to cuss ‘im out, he got ‘im good…
I can’t help but wonder how my life might have been different if a kid like me had been assigned to interpret for a kid like me at San Juan Bautista…Good Lord Awmighty.
Needless to say, my attention to my own school work was frustrating and minimal, in truth because we had missed so much of what led up to the sixth grade, but mostly because I was much more interested in The Spanish Main, the clash of sword against sword, the clash of cultures in the race for God Gold and Glory and most especially, the names and exact locations of the great treasure Galleons that had gone to the bottom bursting with doubloons and now swayed in the sea tide with red eyed skeletons guarding the golden pieces of eight, than in Millard Flurbush, or Floyd Huckabucket (who or what ever they were)
But that was school daze, and when not immersed in defending a translingual scatological diatribe, or my dream life along the Spanish Main, my antenna was “full tuned” out the window towards every passing car radio and the essential life lessons being broadcast freely into the air. Life lessons as only Chuck Berry and Rock n’ Roll could structure and present them…” Be Bop A Lula She’s Mah Ah Bay Bay” “Up in the Morning and off to school” These are the days of “Be Bop A Lula” “Hail Hail Rock n’ Roll” “Party Doll”, “Little Darlin” and “All Shook Up” music that moved us through winter to spring and into the summer of 57. (10 years later as a young staff writer in New York City, I would spend my days at Screen Gems writing “SOON”, cubicle to cubicle with the Great Otis Blackwell, writer of “All Shook up” “Don’t Be Cruel” “Great Balls A Fire” “Fever” and many other seminal, inspirational works of Rock And Roll, but that is another story. One which we will surely get to in it’s time)
Summer, dazzling full on blazing hot, tar melting Summer on the Boardwalk is (in my opinion) one of the elemental full sensory joys of life on Earth. Truly something that everyone ought to experience at least once in their lives.
Many people, especially the old folks and the teenage girls in Far Rockaway, seemed to live for it. The old folks would endure all the bitter winter winds, wearisome woes, disappointments and God awful depression of that seemingly endless time in between. Trudging along, their little spark of the divine flickering through dampness and the blasted semi-damnation of the dark time; waiting for the when the world would be born again.
The when, when a kind of honeyed hell comes to the city and Beelzebub’s own wicked heat hots up the place and the human race once again flings off the cloth (and all modesty) and prances out bellies bouncing, barely clothed, slathered in Sea and Ski, straw hat on the top knot, down to the glorious sea side.
Another group raring to go was the mysterious sideshow of pseudo carnies that opened and ran the flipped out, tripped out stands along the strand, that made and manned the crazy sand blasted or freshly painted pre-psychedelic, psychedelic art and amplified lunacy of the Boardwalk
Oh the smells, my God the smells, the French Fries, Candied popcorn and Hot Dogs (Kosher thank you) Cotton candy, Candied Apples, foot wide lolly pops, Soft Custard in Chocolate and Vanilla, the double Rainbow array of Popsicles and the sodas, Cel-Ray, Sarsaparilla, Orange Crush, Cream Soda, Cherry, Root beer, and the Coca-Pepsi and Chocolate syrup egg creams and the Lemon, Pineapple and Strawberry scent of twirling Salt Water Taffy,
I am sure that the Angeles in Heaven (but perhaps only the goodest of the good ones, like Vicki Sue and my dear partner Kookoolis) are from time to time allowed to part the firmament and stick their noggins down to whiff deeply the aromatics of the Boardwalk…and the Beach (the seaweed, salt air, sea and ski and the fishtunken stink-a-moids stuck in the flotsam and jetsam) because in the Summertime, the super heated swirled up smell of it all together, is well, all together, out of this world.
You understand of course that I (and we) were well adapted to the mystical turquoise tranquility of mountain sheltered coves along the Caribees and the sweet reflective solitude to be found ‘neath the shading (coconut) tree. I’m guessing that you know or have at least heard tell that the Beaches in the Rockaways are any and everything but that. In fact they are the opposite of that in every way.
They are a Symphonic, electronic, “Ca-ca-ca-ca-phony” of clashing color, scent, sound and crazy characters, double amped to the max. I could not believe my eyes and ears (and taste buds) nor the heat of the frying pan hot sand under my feet, the Icy cold water, sea birds screeching, wheeling and robbing, up down around and around, Kiddies screaming and yelling (as often as not because the sea gulls were making off with their samrichs,) people wall to wall everywhere ,standing sitting laying leaping running back and forth slipping, tripping, back flipping ball flying, babies crying, the guys screamin’ Ice Cream, “Hey uh huh getchur Ice Cold Ice Cream Heeya!” It was five towers of Babel fallen on their sides and popping open to spill man’s madness willy nilly upon the land..ah..sand
Every conceivable human activity was being plotted, planed or in process there, I understood it to be my first real exposure to Democracy, and the downtrodden, weary rabble yearning to really be free.. And weaving under around, through and ultimately over and above it all, was the music. The glorious music a never ending arrhythmic crescendo of clashing keys, the competing themes of ultimate liberation of the human spirit.
That was the summer of ”Good Golly Miss Molly” “Searchin’””Bye Bye Love” and well yes “Love Letters In The Sand” and “Tammy” (I WAS a 12 year old romantic, much the same as now) but most of all, it was the Summer of 16 year old Paul Anka’s beautiful record “Diana”. “Diana” was the dream theme of every cross-eyed lovesick skinny bagabones boy who had ever set his eyes and heart on a slightly more physically mature, and sophisticated teenaged dream queen… (you may recall how wide a gap a year or two means in early teen time), “Diana” playing full blast over and above it all took us out of the crazy mind-boggling and delirious Boardwalk Beach, Summer of 57, (so exciting to me), and into the Fall….
Un “supra-stuporus” impression that has lasted, pasted and blasted the test of time, (and still takes my breath away) was what I can only call “My Vision of Arleta”
One pre-adolescent September afternoon when I was twelve, there on a side street close to the Boardwalk just inside the slightly elevated doorway, standing coolly in the tidal wave of jingling boinging bell banging, screeching sirens rackety raucous, sizzled grease burnt electronics and sawdusty scent and sound cloud that is a pinball arcade, was a girl.
And Oh my dear Lord what a girl. A sixteen year old Garrison Belted gum snapping, cigarette dangling helmet haired black leather jacketed death in blue denim Queen, A 1957 New York City, Rock n’ Roll indigo dolly of the most extraordinary God help us, “first plus” order.
Heavy lidded, red lipped, rouge on ivory, pouty, sultry, tough teen atomically charged, motorcycle booted “A-Bomb Baby” white teethed, smooth skinned, insolent virgin seductress, big bang born goddess of love, ah.. Ah… I mean burning lust. Teen Venus Diana Magdalene Italian Valkeri, proud, ah… very proud, of bosom, switch blade flashing, ebony eyed, Arleta.
I stopped, heart pounding in my tracks right in front of her and looked dumb struck directly straight and completely into her face, into her eyes, searching, searching deeply into her soul, for her own registry of this moment. The impact of this momentous eye popping, jaw dropping of “fate in your face” moment.
I stood as her attention slowly shifted in my direction, and then to me, I imagined that the light flash kiss of a lifetime was a moment away that I would soon fling myself upon her bosom and mercy, for now and for the rest of my trembling life.
I steeled my self for her imminent ecstatic recognition, my collapse and complete surrender to her and her Arlettic ways, her eyes swept across my latitude, my geography, my place in time, my whole in the whole of the universe and registered… no thing, no one, nothing. As if my heaving chest and love flushed, thunder struck face was empty space. She registered nada, nada nada.
My friend just off my elbow, who had witnessed the whole thing said matter of factly “Her names Arleta, she’s sixteen” and then “she didn’t even see ya”
What I learned that day was that this particular friend had a way of loudly and UN necessarily belaboring the painfully obvious.
The Vision of Arleta was beyond learning it was just an “is was” or “was is” of the most extraordinary, exciting and lasting, power and inspiration.
The next New York girl that made a strong and lasting impression on me was one that I had also never seen before but got my attention by swacking me smack dab in the eye before raining a torrent of fisticuffs down upon (or rather across) upon me in a mano a mano toe to toe nose to nose, knee to knee belly to belly “watch me beat up this boy battle” that seemingly was born for no other reason than that. Apparently, she saw it to her advantage to demonstrate her ability to “beat up a boy” and scrawny me looked like a most likely candidate… This was a battle that I certainly could not win, however I did manage to avoid humiliating myself for the next sixty years by standing my ground and taking it (rather than running away in tears) until an adult stepped in and sent us each back to our own corner buildings.
Of course my right hand comentater man found it necessary to say loudly and repeat repeatedly “Boy, did you see that? That girl sure can fight” and “Man, a girl was beatin’ you up in front of all those people!”
Continues…
Book 4, Scott Fagan And The MAAC Island Band at The 35th Annual Middletown Fair
BOOK 4. Scott Fagan And The MAAC Island Band at The 35th Annual Middletown Fair.
Up in the states, I am a member of and involved with The MAAC (Middletown Area Arts Collective) MAAC is located in Middletown Pennsylvania, a gritty little town that was once a crossroads of the old canal system (The Union and Pennsylvania Canals met and joined here) then a railroad town, an/industrial center and finally the home of Olmstead Air Force Base.
All of those economic engines have come and gone (the base closed in the sixties) and with them, much of the heart and spirit of the place and its people. The town is most recently known for being the location of the notorious and near catastrophic Three Mile Island Nuke plant meltdown. A not inappropriate illustration of the present state of the Middletown, and its burgers.
It’s the kind of environment in which art is not taken seriously, if, taken at all. The kind of “banged in the noggin” environment where art is likely to be considered (when considered) a serious waste of time.
It is the intention of MAAC or the Collective, to transform the town into a center for the arts and artists. I am a very active supporter of that idea for a number of reasons, and if you’ve been reading the Mem.wa? Reasons, the genesis of which, I don’t have to explain.
Moreover, however and in addition, I am strumulated by (as if I needed any more challenges) the idea of collective consciousness in action and the fun in making music with folks lacking in big city disillusionment, who actually still make music for the love of it.
(You certainly have my permission to assume or conclude that my own constellation of motivations for making music may be somewhat more constrangled with conflicting complexities than the simple pursuit of joy however, believe it or not, the joy found in the “magic moments” in-side the transformational experience of singing/making music, is still the jumbo juice of it all.)
We are going to be doing a one hour concert at the upcoming 35th Annual Middletown Fair, and I am looking forward to the gig. Here is our little local one sheet and the boys (and girl) in the band.
SCOTT FAGAN and The MAAC ISLAND BAND!
www.scottfagan.com www.thecollectedworksofscottfagan.com scottfagan@lilfishrecords.com
SCOTT FAGAN and The MAAC ISLAND BAND have been tearing it up at the Middletown Area Arts Collective since Scott came up from St. Thomas at the beginning of May.
Scott Fagan (Singer) has been an international recording artist since he left high school in St. Thomas Virgin Islands to sign with Columbia Records in 1964. He presently divides his time between The MAAC collective in Middletown and his home in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
Some reviews…
- Cashbox Magazine:
Spinal Tap melodies…His range is phenomenal - Billboard:
“A Poet” - William Krasilovsky, Author, THIS BUSINESS OF MUSIC, l & ll:
“Scott Fagan is a genius. I’ll certify that.”
The MAAC ISLAND BAND is:
Rafael “El Jefe” Martinez, (El Congero) Rafael was born in Armaguerros, Puerto Rico; he has been a “Congero” for over twenty Five years and a “Pennsylvaniero”since 1973.
Drew Washington, (Bass) Originally from New Mexico, Drew appeared at the MAAC Gallery in Middletown one winter night for an open jam and immediately became the BASS Man of Choice for the MAAC ISLAND BAND. Drew has been playing at the highest levels, for over thirty Years.
Tim Griesemer (Drums) is well known through out Pennsylvania (and beyond) for his extraordinary gifts as a drummer. He is master of a wide variety of percussion instruments and has made it his business to “pass it on”
Barbara Vajda… is a Croatian Steelton Guitar Goddess with a long musical history in Pennsylvania. After a hiatus to raise little ones, The Goddess is back with SCOTT FAGAN and the MAAC ISLAND BAND.
Friends of MAAC may pop up or chime in as the spirit moves them and time will allow.
Sound Engineering for SCOTT FAGAN the MAAC ISLAND BAND is by digitaldave, 30 Years on the knobs.
CONTACT Tim Griesemer Home 717-944-3023 Cell 717-439-1919 or Scott Fagan 717-592-0853 scott@lilfishrecords.com
My little joke is that at sixty-four, opportunity is once again knocking at the door, the problem is finding my glasses my walker and my wig and then getting my shakity self to the door in time, or possibly, even hearing the blasted knocking in the first place, or if I do hear the K’ NOK figgerin’ out what the heck it is. I’m a tellin’ ya..
The gig is over, and we did a great job. I am very grateful to the “Great Artist” for giving me the gift and ability to sing, I just love to sing..And thanks to all that is good, I was able to sing like a banshee.
We have another gig,(this time a two hour concert) scheduled from five to seven on the 26th of June here in Middletown, at the old log cabin down by Swatara Creek. (No I’m not kidding, for reals)
The new CD “Scott Fagan’s The Virgin Island Songs, Live in Concert” will be coming out in July with the new recording of “Surrender To The Sun” as the single. While we are trying to promote the release, we will be busy recording The MAAC Island Band and my self, live in Middletown.
Playing live shows and singing up a storm is great fun for me and I hope that we will be able to gig and that I will be able to continue singing as well as I am for a long long time. In order to do that, we need to find an agent able to book the gigs.
It’s a new world and the dawning of a new paradigm for music and the relationship between music creators and them that love music. I wish that my beautiful partner the Great Cocacola (Kookoolis) and the many friends of “SOON” were still around to see this day. What a Cabruncle the Music Business did to the Music Business… We will sing and play and, “The Great Artist” willing, love, clear thinking and collective effort, will find a way…yep! Continues…
Book 1. In Nueva York!
BOOK 1. In Nueva York!
We arrived in Nueva York that night with the wind a blowing and the snow a snowing… Mud walked out of the plane, down the stairs and across the tarmac with little Larry snuggled in her arms, Gale and I following behind. People looking in amazement at this woman and her children dressed for the fourth of July, apparently completely ignorant of things like baby blankets, mittens,, noggin toppers and the like. An older white gent looked pityingly at Mother with her little brown babe in arms, and took off his heavy overcoat, draping it over Mother and child. We knew instantly that we were in a world, a reality that was completely foreign to us, we (Gale and I) had spent over half of our young lives surrounded by people of color, or colors, immersed in cultures and climes very much other than this one.
I can’t speak for Gale on this but I had come to view the world from the position of an underdog with “something to prove” and white folks as “odd otheren” that we did not particularly identify with or fully understand.
It was very strange to see “the othern” all around us, and to all but hear them making judgments about Mother and Larry and Gale and I, things became even stranger when we saw our first so called “American Negros” all relegated to subservient positions in the airport, and saw (and felt) the tense and toxic vibes that existed between the Blancos and los Negros and vice versa.
The number of shifting realities present in those first minutes in the terminal at Idlewild Airport that winter night was fantastic.
Our survivor antenna were sparking and spinning like never before…our exposure to the new “who is what to whom and which is where and why and how and what is what is what” would take intense sorting out and every day that followed would bring more and more of the same…
For example, the very next day while riding in Mud’s twin sister Lea’s husband Jack’s (who had been on the verge of marrying Mud in St. Thomas before she choose Howard instead and we wound up in Puerto Rico) car, I saw a white kid my age running like crazy down the middle of a four lane avenue, a huge box of Jujubes in his hand with the lean mean grown up manager of a nearby supermarket right behind him. The kid was flying…
I was filled with curiosity and strong emotions as I watched, in large part because I had never seen a white person in either of these roles. Why would a white kid have to steal anything? Why does a grown up white man care enough about a box of candy to be running around in the street traffic and risking his life, like this? “Suppose the man catches him? is he going to kill him or just hurt him? Will the kid fight him and bite him? Will they call his parents? Does he have any parents? Will the police come, will they beat him up? I thought It was among the strangest things I had ever seen, but only because the people were white.
In my experience, white people didn’t work, and certainly they didn’t run through traffic risking their lives over a box of Jujubes, white kids didn’t have to steal candy they were rich and got what ever they wanted by whining for it.
The white adults I knew were wild eyed artists or owned things like hotels or jewelry stores or were plump and pale effete tourists, the only white children that I’d ever seen (or could remember having seen…-although we may have seen some such before we went to the Islands in the first place) poor enough to perhaps have to help themselves to a bon bon from time to time, were Gale and me, and of the two of us I was the only white child that I know of in the whole wide world that had actually stolen (and eaten) candy. In reality, I had stolen some pennies and a quarter, some nickels, and dimes, half a handful of change from the cash box of a little shop in the Islands owned by the parents of friends of Gale and mine. (I was so young that I didn’t yet know how to count, or I was so upset at what I had done that I didn’t want to know how bad a deed it was, I bought some penny candy with it just outside of the Barracks Yad and stuck the booty and the little looty left over under my pillow. Apparently I had scooped up more than I needed for the penny candy I wanted, so..not knowing what to do with the overage, I may have thrown it away by the road side) Nevertheless, even though I was only six or seven when I lost my state of grace to petty penny pilferin’ misery, I still felt terrible about it. (Ah..In fact, I still do) Against that background, I struggled with what I was seeing play out in the middle of the traffic before us. A light changed somewhere and we moved on down the road without seeing the conclusion of the tableau or act three. (My hope has always been that the boy got away but was so upset by his actions and outcome that he never never never did anything like that again. It may be an unlikely end story however, because frankly the little white kid looked like a pretty tough little guy already. Another something novel and new to me)
Lea and Jack were pretty blasé about the whole thing it, and I got the impression that stuff like that happened all the time. It “blew my mind” (which means it exploded my preconceived notion of a particular reality) Yep,
Then there was this thing called television, and its crazy crazy shows like “Queen For A Day” and “$64,000 Question” and something called “The Mouseketeers” with a beautiful soulful looking girl named “Annette Funichello”. We were in someplace called “Kew Gardens” in a world dunked and dyed this God awful brown and gray. A color that I’ve since dubbed “Brey” the essence of depression that ran under over and through everything everywhere you looked. The sound track to all of this was an Ookity Dookity song called “Catch A Falling Star And Put It IN Your Pocket And Save It For A Rainy Day” by a singing barber named “Perry Como” who made Pat Boone look like Humphrey Bogart. The song was #1 in this, the world of Rock And Roll, one more reason why Gale and I along with Mud and Little Larry were thoroughly disoriented and confused.
One day I was looking out the window and saw some scruffy older kids messing around with the great New York City equalizer, Stickball. However, just as I had earned my own place in the scruffy lineup, the whole kapassel of us (Mud, Lea, Jack, Hansie ( Lea and Jack’s little guy John Just about the same age as Larry) Claudia (Lea’s beautiful little girl,around two years old at the time) Gale, Larry and I.) left for Far Rockaway and Wave Crest Gardens.
“Wave Crest Gardens” (two or three blocs of “private” public housing type buildings, each “Bloc” consisting of two U-shaped six-story buildings facing each other from either end of a raised central space containing park type benches and the odd patch of grass, stunted trees and bushes. The “Gardens” were a block from the board walk and the beach at Far Rockaway. A far so far that the Board walk actually ended there. It reminds me of El Ultimo Trolley in its lonely finality.
Now we were in another world, inside another world, because most of the people living there were a kind of white people called “Jewish” a people with some interesting thoughts and experiences around race and cultural prejudice themselves. Of course up to that point the whole Jewish New York reality might have been a Chinese opera for all we knew, however we soon realized we were foreigners again with much to learn. And we did.
Probably first and foremost was the realization that the ideas that we had about white people were pretty much adopted from black people and brown people who had been oppressed and disrespected by “the white people” and were jusifiably wary of any universe that contained them. Consequently, our understanding of “white people” was cockamamie and incomplete. We realized that up close, there was (for us at least) no “the white people” rather there were innumerable groups of disparate peoples (many of whom and didn’t like each other one bit), fought constantly and said nasty things about each other. We were now living among a “white people” who had been wronged, abused, brutalized, and murdered due to prejudice. However, inspite of that, I was surprised to discover that some of the kids had some hateful prejudices of their own.
Fairly early on as we all jockeyed for places in the hierarchy of cool (roughly based on appearance, ability to fight, demonstrated skill in Stickball, Punch ball, Handball, Stoopball, and your ability to sound like the singer on a Rock and Roll record) some of my age peers (11 or 12 years old) came running breathlessly to tell me that “Alan” a hither to coolish bigger, older kid, had called me a…a…a…”spip or spuk or snik or something”, a word I had never heard in my life and had no meaning whatsoever for me. “What’s that? I asked them, “It’s a person from Puerto Rico!” they exclaim-s’plained, a person who comes from Puerto Rico! “We came here from Puerto Rico, but what’s the matter with that”? I wondered and asked. They were flabbergasted…how could I not know what that word meant? How could I not be outraged by the word? How could I not know that someone had tried to be completely demeaning and insulting of me and what the idiot thought were my people? By calling me a word that had no meaning? I didn’t get it, It was ridiculous.
I didn’t even know what he and they were talking about. It took quite a while for me to understand and realize that this Jewish kid (a bigger older kid who I had respected and thought worth learning something from) thought he was putting me down by calling me a spluk or something. It really was ridiculous. (Years later a New York Taxi Driver trying to hip me to the ways of the City and educate me about Borinquenos, proudly explained to me that “People from Puerto Rico are “Spanish Puerto Rican Indian Coloreds” and that’s why we call them that word.
I still didn’t get where the insult is in being “Spanish Puerto Rican Indian Colored”, because in fact there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a beautiful joining of beautiful peoples with a powerful and romantic heritage and history.
Anyway, that kind of cruel idiocy seems to be one of the common threads connecting all of human kind, it’s always disappointing when it shows up but most especially from someone who you think might have suffered enough to know better. As I said earlier, we would learn a great deal in Far Rockaway, New York, USA in the Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, of 1957. Continues…
Book.4 When Buckra De Paehae Went To Go To De States
“When Buckra De Paehae Went To Go To De States”
Man one day I look around ana realize all me fren dem, every las one a alla dem boy, done gan to de states..an so I sae to me self, ah sae “Buckra you bettah go see wha goin on up in de states to see if yu want to join up wid dem up dae an become one a dem freshwater Yankee jus like de res a dem boy.”
Well me boy, de trouble start, when ah went down to de travel office to buy me plane ticket, De white woman sittin doun in dare sae “May I help yu?”Ah say yes Mum, ah wan to go to de states. De woman say, “where would you like to go?” Ah say, ah say, ah would likes to go to de states, de woman say fine, where do you want to go, Ah say wha wrang wid yu you keeyan undahstan English? Yu bettah don frig me up, Ah sae ah wants tu go tu the states S.T.A.T.S. de states, de states! Wha wrang wid yu? Is yu schupid o sumtin?
Wid dat de woman went in de back an come back out wid a big strang bighead jackass of a island man. He say..yu wan me bilge in yu ass fo yu? Wha yu come in here tu frigg up de people dem fa,.. yu bettah scat yu ass befo ah broke it up in splinters!
Wha? ah say wa? Yu kno who yu talking to like dat? Ah say I is a man wha come in here to pay Kole keash to go tu de states an yu going on like a jack ass wid me? Wha wrang wid yu, ah say ah wan to go tu de states, yu nevah heard a de place?
Jus den de woman squeaky lil voice pipe up from in de back, she sae “ask the Idiot where he wants to go to, you’ll see” So de Islan man say “Whey ‘tis yu wan tu go” Now de Buckra starting tu ge frigup, yu know ha ah mean?
How many times ah gat u tell dese schupiddy people whae it is ah wan tu go? Ah say ah wan to go tu de states! De man come up close close and he say “look yu schupid buckra, Don’t you know that there is more than one state in de states?” Ah say more dan one state? more dan one state? of course I kno dares more dan one state. wha wrang wid yu, yu tink I don kno about Englan and France? but I wan tu go see dem boy in de united state.
De woman in de back call out, “call the cops, Renwick, nobody can’t be that stupid”
Ah sae who de hell yu callin schupid.. is yu don’t know how to sell a plane ticket tu go to de states, Ahh yu cou kiss me royal red bate me boy, I gan frum here!
An wid dat ah leave ou de place, ana went straight ovah to de seaplane. De fus man wha ah see ovah dae ah sae, tell me something my good fellow, does ah yu know how to fin de states? De man sae of course, but dis plane goin Sain Croix, ah sae but if ah gon ge yu me good money tu go tu de states, yu can’t tun around de plane an go to de states? De man sae, wha wrang wid yu, yu drunk o something? Ah sae no man it too early fo dat, I only had bout tree or four..tu start off de day…de man sae “My dear fellow,.. yu bettah go down tu de airport and tell dem people whae yu wan tu go..ah tink dey gon know exactly wha to do fo yu.
So ah pick up me suitcase, ana wen doun de road lookin fo de airpoat, Boy when ah reach up tu de top a China Man Hill, ah cou see how de ting dem change up, almost alla China Man Hill,.. gan from China man Hill,
Ah stop a fellow ana say “Hey meson, Wha happen to de whole a doun de road, wha happen tu de China Man dem? whey all dey people dem fum Nisky gane?, An “OhGodee”, ah sae, look wha happen tu Sara Hill!
De whole a Sara Hill what was dare since de Island get belch up from de bottom of de deep blue sea, is gan, ah sae Tell me man, ah gotta know, wha goin on doun here?
De man sae, “No habla engles” Ah SaeWha? I mubbe gan Poto Rico.
When ah did finally arrive at whea de Harry S. Truman airport suppose tu be, ah see all kina ting, but what I don see is de Harry S. Truman airport,
Ah see a kina fatty woman livin in a smally smally lil house right in de middle a de road, de woman stannin up wid she hand out side de door beggin money from de car dem, an every onea dem stopping to ge she some, Ladee me boy, Oy ain nevah see noting like dat an look a joke, I ain even reach close to de states yet
But de ting wha ah keean see is de terminal, de big ol hangah place whey de steelban dem used to be bawlin blood for we cu dance an wuk up wid dem Puerto Rican Gurl when de come fo Carnival! Ah hol ah man ana sae “Hey, wha goin an here meson, wha dey hidin’ de airport?” He sae Abdoul Ab Salamm, Abdoul Ab Salamm..
De fatty woman sae, look ovah de hill man, look ovah de hill.
Lemme tell yu something, all I wan tu du is gemme plane ticket tu go tu de states tu see dem boy an fine out if I wantu join up wid de fresh watah yankee dem, but not only doan nobody know how tu sell a plane ticket tu de states, but now dey gan an change up de name and move de airport. Yu sure dis is dey way every body does get tu de states? Lard if is so had tu go, imagin how hard it mus be tu come back, wha yu tink?
Meson when ah finally reach dung, tu de place wha dey suppose tu be selling de ticket dem, ah sae “ah wan tu buy a plane ticket tu de states” de woman sae “Ok where are yu goin” Ah sae Oh lard don’t tell me dis is dat again, ah sae Ah wan tu go tu de states! Wha wrang wid alyu people, ah wan yu go tu de states! Den de woman sae, ok which state. Now dis is one Islan woman wha mussa had good states side training because das de fus time any body ask me dat question, ana wan yu know I were ready wid me ansah,
Ah sae ah wan tu go to de place wha name Miami Atlanta Florida New Yawk, because das whea alla dem boy is.
She sae I’m sorry, that’s impossible, there is no such place. I sae Yu lie, Yu Lie, Yu big bum ting yu, ah catch yu now, yu lie, das whea alaldem boy gan, wha wrang wid allyu crazy people, Ah sae, gimme me plane ticket an don frig me up no mo o I’ll broke off me foot in yu Batey!!
When she hear dat De woman eye dem open wide wide and she say “of course Mr. Buckra De Paehae, just one moment please, wait here, I know exactly who can help you. Ah sae now yu talking, dis is de way yu suppose tu treat a man who is all dress up an goin to de states.
Jus den two man hooks me up from behine, dey grab on tu de back a me pants an lif me up straight up in de air, me pants went up in me bum til ah had tu bawl out “Oh God Ah Dead, ah give up, ah give up! Den dey grab me han an me foot an thro me in de back like two hundred poun a wet sal fish.
All dis time all de touris dem laughing me boy, ana hear one a de chrerenn dem sae “Mommy whats the matter with that man?” De muddah sae “Nothin dear that’s just what too much rum and hot sun’ll do to ya, an thats exactly what’ll happen to your blasted Father if we don’t get ‘im back to Baltimore right away”
When De man dem thro me doun, de bigges one sae “C’mon now Buckrat boy, let’s hear some more of your noisy big lip about what you’re gonna do wid yer foot, an who your gonna do it to”
Ah sae Oh God, Oh God ah give up, ah give up, ah change me moine sah, ah change me moine, I ain want tu go tu de states, ah change me moine, ah wan tu go home.
Walll… De man sae “It’s too late fer that Buckrat, ya crazy little weasel, you’re goin ta Guantanamo wid the rest a dem terrorists.
Ah sae “Oh Godee Oh Godee!, Ah give up Sah Ah Give up Sah!
Man, ah had tu beg dem, an beg dem, an beg dem boy tu loose me, an when de finally lemme getaway, Lord me boy, ah pick up me suitcase an Iain stop runnin’ til ah pass Demarara.
Wen ah catch meself, ah sae “Buckra, It look like yu bettah tell one a dem boy in de states tu sen doun a ticket fo yu, if dey wan yu come up tu play fresh watah yankee wid dem.
An when dey sen doun me ticket, das how de Buckra finally get tu go tu de states,.. but das a whole uddah story meson, believe me..das a whole uddah story, Laa-dy, me bouy… whata trelele!
Book 1. Isla Grande #7, El Ultimo Trolley And Book 4. Juxtapositions…
Book 1. Isla Grande #7, El Ultimo Trolley
In the Dark Age just before Gale found our salvation in Rock and Roll, one day out of the blue our Pop or, the man we knew as “Frankie” showed up ah… came to visit. He peeked in on Howard, in bed with a bottle of Don Q, spoke “be-bop jargon” to Mother (Gale and I had some sort of linguistic flashback, we hadn’t heard “be bop” since we were babes in arms, all in all, considering the wild and varied verbilations that we sprang from and were steeped in, it’s wonderly that we speak any Angleish ‘tall. “Fee is uk and foo is ock mon! No?”
Frankie wasted no time in showing us how much fun that we’d been missing, Laughing, joking, singing, punch ball, stoop ball, stick ball. Hey ya want some ice cream? Sure, why not! He spent two days with us and when he left, we were so frigging turned inside out, bummed and depressed that it was beyond words. What the frig are adults thinking?
It wasn’t that Howard was a bad guy it’s just that he was chronically disabled by the rum, he was a drunk guy that stayed in bed drinking and throwing up, Mud scrambled all over the place juggling Howard, Little Larry (who was home from the hospital and sleeping in a drawer) Gale and me and whatever freelance typing jobs she could find in Puerto Rico for secretaries who don’t speak the language, and God help us, her own wants, needs and dreams.
I accept the possibility that I may have been somewhat pre-occupied with self at ten, nevertheless, I loved my Mudder and even I knew that this life was not what she had in mind when she and her beautiful twin sister Lea, skipped blithely away from the life they knew, to the Frangipangi scented trade winds, blue seas and blue skies of the Bonny Bongo Isles. Mud was a Jazz baby (in fact Baby was her nickname) and music was a central part of her heart and soul. Her most prized possession by far was a steamer trunk filled with her “Jazz baby” collection of 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s 78’s. This is Billie Holiday, Early Sarah Vaughan, Ella, Julie Christy, Dakota Staton, Billy Eckstein, Mr. Five by Five, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Gale’s own God Father Dizzy Gillespie, and many many others.
To any hip music lover, the trunk was worth ten times its weight in gold. A local department store agreed and allowed her to use her collection as collateral for a loan, a loan which she eventually could not repay and one day in the dark ages they came and took Mother’s mother lode of music and happiness away.
I will never be able to explain to you what that means if you don’t already know, and if you know, you know.
I was not able to understand how Howard would allow that to happen. Why he didn’t stick up a Muelberia, or a Lechonirea, or ultra leverage heaven and hell somehow, someway, anyway, to get it back. That is until years later, in St. Thomas, all grown up and talking with him about music, he proudly announced to me that his favorite musical artist/singer of all time, was Edie Gorme.
Anyway, shortly after Frankie’s visit and the loss of Mother’s most centrally important possession, we lost the pad on Ashford Avenue and moved to a part of Santurce called Ocean Park.
Ocean Park was a “working class” neighborhood very light on anglish and very heavy on macho. And, to tell you the truth, (even though it was always maximo stressful to maintain) macho worked for me. Although I was significantly undersized and underweight, I could run and leap and field and throw and bat and all around play ball with the best. We were going to “Santa Terisita” (I had just started the sixth grade) and los Guapos (the tough guys) in the neighborhood were amazed and proud that “Ocean Park” had a “little Gringito” who seemed fearless and could and would catch “all the fuego” that they or anybody else could throw. Ocean Park had a little Guapito Gringito to call it’s own.
As a little white boy in the West Indies, my basic defense mechanism was an absolute commitment to death over dishonor, to dying rather than to be thought of and treated as less than. The boys from Ocean Park and I had good times playing ball in the school yard at Santa Teresita (where even though I was the smallest, I was one of very few who could hit the ball over the wall) and at a poetically named place that resides in my imagination still, like some perfect Spanish three word haiku “El Ultimo Trolley”.
This field of dreams was a sandlot large enough for a traditional baseball diamond, along the right field line was an actual old trolley car (the last trolley car in PR, or El Ultimo Trolley). Why a thing like that would stimulate such romantic feelings in me even as a boy, is a fine mystery. (My imaginings relating to it run more to Panama hats and Pan Am Clippers, than to baseball caps and the Yankee Clipper), in spite of the fact that it was the first place that I had ever actually played on a baseball diamond. I, up to that time had great and highly developed skills for alley ball or coconut trees in the middle ball or a sock with a rock in the middle ball, but…diamonds? Fortunately my skills as a stone throwing ragamuffin were transferable, and the baseball diamond was grooveland for me.
I had a great arm, (trained and fine tuned in St. Thomas “teefin” mangos by knocking them out of the tops of trees) so I was a Center fielder and a pitcher. (Frankie was a great pitcher too and tried out for the “New Yawk G’ints”, his dream of dreams was to be the boy in his poem “Now Pitching For New York!” (a poem unfortunately lost to the depredations and natural disassemblage of life and the things of life in beer can ridden rusty trailers on the skeeter riddled edge of the western Everglades). Were it not for Jazz, ball might have been Frankie’s thing, And were it not for “just around the corner Rock and Roll”, ball might have been my thing also.
Around that time Gale and I were put out of school for the family’s inability to pay the tuition. Mud tried kitchen table school but with the afore-mentioned set of responsibilities that she had, good old book larnin’ went the way of the wind.
Meanwhile, Shortly after Father’s visit, he sent us a smiling photograph of himself standing next to an almost new car with a beautiful Blonde woman and a brand new little baby in his arms. Gale and I felt pretty much completely abandoned.
A couple of things occurred to cheer things up, one was me smacking the neighborhood bully in the face so hard that he burst into tears, and the other was Howard finally landing the Civil Engineering job that had been the carrot that had brought us all to La Isla Grande two and a half years earlier, in the first place. Continued…..
Book 4. Juxtapositions…
Last night a young man brought a pristine copy of “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” to the Saturday night gig at the Collective (The Middletown Area Arts Collective or MAAC), for me to sign. Digital Dave took an interesting photograph of the young gent and me holding the record between us and shaking hands.
What a frigging “Plur-iverse” of thought and emotion the occasion stimulates and unleashes in me.
The young man was interested in talking about what happened with “SOON” (My January 1971 Broadway produced Rock Opera and the backlash that it created in the music business towards my writing partner Joe and I) You can be sure that in time I will exhaust all there is to say about SOON, but in the meantime, “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” in itself was a good illustration of how wide the chasm between “show” (meaning the art of show and the show of art) and “Business” was and is.
In 1967, Jerry Shoenbaum was the head of Verve-Forecast, the hottest “Folk-Rock” label in the world, My manager at the time, Herb Gart (who I had signed with in hopes of rubbing noses with his client Buffy Saint Marie,) shopped SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES to Jerry, he loved it and was about to sign me and the album to Verve-Forecast, when ATCO (who wanted to get in on the Folk-Rock market), offered Jerry the presidency of ATCO and Bo-coup fazools if he would leave Verve and come there. Jerry said Ok, but I’m bringing Scott Fagan and “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” along to be my first release on ATCO, so… while Jerry negotiated his deal, it was decided that I should go ahead and sign with ATCO, which I did. However, ATCO never came to terms with Jerry, Jerry Schoenbaum never signed with ATCO. And there I was. It happens that I loved ATCO because Ben E. King and The Drifters, who had been my favorites for years were there, but ATCO, basically Ahmed Ertigun, was not well inclined towards me, or my album (To Ahmed I was “the kid who sings with a lisp”), and on the other hand, I considered him a jiveass racist thief) and naturally, the new incoming head of ATCO Jerry Greenberg, (one of Ahmed’s protégés) was not at all inclined to elevate and promote Jerry Schoenbaum’s pet project. In short, “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” got buried at ATCO.
Folks can argue the reletive merits and quality of the lisping, the songs and the recording back and forth all they want (and they do) but Jasper Johns discovered “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” in a cutout bin, listened and fell in love with it. Jasper did a lithograph of the A Side of the album and immortalized it as “SCOTT FAGAN RECORD” a lithograph that wound up in the permanent collection of the National Gallery, MOMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, The Israeli Museum in Tel Aviv, and many others, among them perhaps most ironically, the personal collection of Ahmed Ertigun himself.
In my view, “SOUTH ATLANTIC BLUES” is a good and interesting, first album or “record” by and of a sincere and fairly unusual artist at a particular time and place. The follow-up album was to have been the Rock Opera “SOON” (which we will finally be able to release this year, better a little late than never)
I am in it for the music, the impact that it may have for the good, and the hope for positive change in the lives of my little ones and the worlds that they live in. That’s how it was, that’s how it is and that’s how it will be…
Book 4. Zoom! and Book 1. Isla Grande.6
Book 4. Zoom!!
Zoom..We finished the first run of the new CD just in time for me to get to the airport and back to St. Thomas for the French Man’s Reef Concert, The concert is a fundraiser for COAST, the local affiliate of The National Council On Alcoholism and Drug Dependency. The event honors The Reverend Ray Joseph and local businessman and COAST Board member Ronnie Lockhart.
Zoom Zip Zoom
The need for recovery services is very acute in The Virgin Islands and is dramatically illustrated by the following bit of information (reported to me by Nancy Waite O’Brian former director of COAST and Clinical Director at The Betty Ford Center) from the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency: “The incidence of alcohol related deaths in Texas is twice tha of the other contiguous states, The incidence of alcohol related deaths in Alaska is twice that of Texas, and The incidence of alcohol related deaths in The U.S. Virgin Islands is twice that of Alaska.”
Zap…
In other words, The Virgin Islands have the highest incidence of alcohol related deaths under the American Flag, and possibly the least number of recovery support services under the American Flag as well. I am doing this fundraiser in an attempt to help COAST do something about that.
Zoom, When I get back to the states, we will do a CD release/Launch Party and focus on “The Virgin Islands Songs, The Musical, in Concert, and the single from the album, the new recording of “Surrender To The Sun” and.. Zoom, I am in St. Thomas. Tomorrow morning I start doing radio interviews to promote the Concert event.
Unfortunately, someone set the ticket price @ $75.00 per, which I’m afraid is way too high for most working people. In fact, I’m tempted to say “hey wait, if you are coming to see me, come and see me somewhere else at a price that you can afford”, but, as I am clearly the living embodiment of the “anti moolah” and obviously, not the best authority on manifesting the glittery green goulash, perhaps I ought to defer my own lah de dah and concentrate instead on the fact that we are doing a much-needed fundraiser for a good and necessary cause.. Zip
I will do my best, and hope that my people will understand. (Hey waitaminnit, “my people” are the very people most likely to benefit from the very services that we are raising funds for the agency to be able to provide to…hmmm, Oh yeeeahhh…) Ok.
Double Zoom… today is the 22nd of April,and it is Sula’s 108th birthday, She will have her Birthday party on Saturday, we will gather at her little very old “wood house”, on the hill above Neltejburg Bay and sing and laugh and celebrate the love of a young girl, who at one hundred and eight, has maintained her enthusiastic innocence in spite of having seen it all. What an extraordinary gift she is.
Zoom Zoom and Zoom I did three radio shows at three different radio stations for three completely different demographical groups today and another yesterday, each one an interesting host and personalities and conversations and settings
Zoom, yesterday at 8 AM was with a very interesting and energized activist member of our community Ms. Lesly Commisiong, host of her own show on talk radio 1000. We had a great time and may have enlisted her as a potential board member for COAST. She is a great resource for this community and we shall see if time will allow het to join the board.
Now this morning at 9:00 AM the first show was with “Sisi” a real fast talking happy talk rockin’ chick on “HITS 100”, Sisi is a young local rocker of color woman, whose parade of addresses and places lived in the states, reminds me of no one more than my self, we had a great time together, and it was beautiful to watch her interact with the young local college student interning with her. Zam! Next was radio station “WGOD” (really) at the very tippy top of Crown Mountain. Not much to say other than it was the closest thing to Heaven since “Calwin’s Caribilly Bar” and we had great fun (really) with those good folks also. Third was “Zim Zam Zoom” WSTA and “Brownie” always fun, always wonderful. Brownie (and WSTA) have been a primary support for my music and me for over forty-five years. Their kindness is always very much appreciated, and Brownie is one very funny man.
Zoom to Saturday! What a good time we had at Sula’s 108th Brithday party today. Old Island recipe birthday cakes galore, warm wonderful family friendships, the Nisky Congregation out in force, and the power of love in evidence and evident everywhere. And…”Food ke-an done, me bouy wha!”
Zib, Zubb! Tomorrow is the big Concert and I will sing my heart out,. I have prep work to do in the morning so I am going to go to bed… Good night, it’s been a great day! God bless you each and every one!
incidently, I was talking with Tut’s wife Mary last evening while a stateside TV show was “noisifying” in the background. In the story, some awfully self-righteous prosecuting attorney with the most insultingly superior attitude, (supposedly representing “The people” ah…that would be us) was prosecuting a case by harassing and haranguing a Rock and Roll Band’s sound man on the stand, in a most diminishing, disrespectful and demeaning way.
It was crazy! The tv writers seem to think that the viewers will swing right along with them, and co-sign anything. Don’t they know that everybody knows, that any good sound man is worth double his weight in law degrees and ten times his weight in condescending, arrogant and square lawyers? What kind of crazy reverseled up value system are they promoting? How could the producers and networks broadcast such a cockeyed premise? How could the advertisers support it? Gol dang, Sometimes I wonder if the people in TV land think the rest of us out here in the free world, are still back in the 1950’s, or just plain stupid er whut.
On the other hand, it’s a fact that no one would believe the real adventures of “Life In The Bongo Isles” either..I guess you just have to suspend belief…
We did the concert, I’m happy to report that I was in fine voice and our sound preparations were sufficient (the sound man is Marcellus Edwards, Tut’s son who is also the owner operator of ZIP car rentals in St. Thomas) Marcellus is a fine lad, a dread-locked jewish gent of the “Lion Of Judeah” lost tribe school of Hebrish history, and so my friends we see again the grand combinations of flavors in the God Soup of life doen in the Bongo Isles
Marcellus’s Great Grand Mother (on his father’s side) was a full blooded Carib from the reserve in Dominica, but his Great- Great Grand Father (still on his Fater’s side) was a black, black smith from Ethiopia (that’s the lost tribe part, but lost tribe as filtered through and from The New York City penal system’s cauldron of salvatory spirituality. most specifically, the Rikers Island rabbinical school of this that and the next thing, as proselytized and evangelized to and through our very own “Terry The Pirate” AKA “Crossbones” AKA “The Rabbi” The long and short of it all is.. Marcellus is a grand and good fellow, and in large part because of his loving kindness,and skill, the Concert went well
Zoom, Carnival village for one night and then Zoom, back to the states. I’m so Zoomed out I’m downright dizzified.
Book 1. Isla Grande.6
That thing about Rock And Roll that I wrote about earlier, that thing made all the difference. The music moved me. Not just emotionally or in terms of excitement, but it moved me up from a sense of almost complete vulnerability (aka childhood), to a kind of independence.
That was the effect that it had on both of us, both Gale and I. Man, do I love my sister Gale. She was the leader, she led us carefully (or as carefully as an 11 1/2 half-year old girl could) ou of dependent childhood into an wonderneverland of “boppers” the land of “electric Rock And Roll Pan” a land which I inhabit to this day.
God bless that Gale, after our time on our own, (once Mud and Howard had come back into the scene), she decided that we (she and I) would start going to church on Sundays. We did that for a few Sundays..we woild get up early and put on our best clothes, and head out to one or another Catholic Church in Santurce, it was a bit odd I suppose for the regulars to thy and grok what the heck two little dressed up but raggedy white kids were doing coming to their Church all by them selves, but whatever their concerns, they were kind. However, what ever “scent in the air” Gale was following or looking for, it wasn’t there at Church.
Eventually the scent led us to English-speaking Radio Station WHOA and it’s Saturday afternoon “on the air” Elvis Presley Fan Club and “Rock And Roll” dance party. Only the Lord (and Gale) knows how she managed to find the bus fare and then the station, but she did and there we went, on the bus, on our own, away from the snooty rich kids, across Santurce to Rio Piedras and beyond. Our excitement building every parada of the way. Gale had found and followed the scent that led to the great fountain of life, the Fountain Of Youth, only instead of making us younger, it brought us to the immensely joyful spirit of youth eternal, of youth in rebellion, the bottomless pool of timeless energy that empowers and informs and reinforces the impregnable and impervious optimism that transforms a child into timeless youth. We were instantly older and instantly hipper, and ever so much forever more free. The vehicle was Rock And Roll and the casteless, classless collective consciousness that it invited and created everywhere it went. And boy I’ll tell ya, my sister Gale and I were ready. Continued…
Book 4. De Barracks Yad Bay An Beach Club. Book 1. Isla Grande.5 Continued…
De Barracks Yad Bay An Beach Club
It jus so happen dat one day roun de bay dere by de Barracks yad a big truck come an dump out a truck load a san. Wha! Yeh meboy, (I se to meself) now yu talking boy, lemme go lay doun in it. No sooner said dan done an I was de fus man dare.
Boy, ah lay back an cross me leg an crass up me han dem behine me head like ah comtemplating de clouds in de clear blue sky. De nex second, ah jump up ana run back home to de head a pave street for me Muddah towel ana umbrella fo style, den ah grab up a can a sardine, two French bread ana red soda ana fly back to de beautiful new san at wha I kno gon soon be “De Barracks Yad Bay an Beach Club” Yeh meboy, ah se to meself now yu talking now yu talking.
By de time ah reach back, three o fo touris had done fin de spot, but ah tro doun me self right in de middle ah dem, put an me shades ana open me sardine.
Jus den a big hard face man se “Hey Buckra, wha de hell yu tink yu doin, yu can’ see we come tu mix up concrete an cement?” Ah se “wha? Yu crazy? Wha yu commin’ to de beach tu mix up concrete and cement” De man se “Is you is de one who crazy, who de hell tell you dis is a beach, we makin’ a watahfront fo bigtruck cou pass here” Ah se “wha? Is YOU is de one who crazy, look de beautiful blue watah de, look de san here, look de people in de middle. We here in de Barracks Yad waitin’ bocoups an many years plus fo somebody to bring de san fo de beach. Man de people dem been laydin doun in de mud full a crab hole an rock stone an badein’ in de watah wha de bottom fulla broke shell an beer can. De chrirren dem billin san calsel outtah mud an don’ talk abou when de gut runnin and de nightsoil commin’ doun, den dey makin mud pie outta dat!
No man, we waitin’ two hundred years an mo for dis san tu come (an fo somebody to plug up de gut) We ain’ wan no concrete and cement fo de beach, how de people dem gon lay doun on concrete and cement?, why yu wan tu have to jump up wid yu coal pot an yu fry fish and yu mabi an yu blanket an everyting, everytime some schupid muddah skunk ina bigtruck want tu pass. Yu crazy? No man, bring mo san! Dis is de place right here me boy, in fac we should exten de beach all de way from Wes Indian dock to Cha Cha Ta…ah.. ah mean French Toun!
Yu kno de beach belongs to de people dem and dat way every day will be like Christmas Mahnin fo de whole ah Charlotte Amalia me boy. Man sellin fraco an jumbi bead lef an right, woman sellin pate an benye by de poun. Touris frum all ovah de place commin to see de most beautiful town in de wurl, wid de bigges an de bes and de most beautiful beach in de wurl, rite in de middle ait. An de people dem will own de whole ting!. Man ah tell yu bring mo san! Bring mo san!
Book 1. Isla Grande. 5 Continued
In “La Isla Grande”, the upside of the downside, was always the kindness of strangers.
Which is not to say that all strangers were kind, nor to suggest that all kindness came from strangers either, but life has flung us all in a great tumble barrel of circumstance and situation and so sometimes, you just never know.
For example…Howard had a friend from his soldierin’ days, who was himself still in the Army and stationed in Puerto Rico. The friend “Morris” would visit our pad from tine to time. Morris was a great looking, fine and enthusiastic fellow, He had light brown skin that set off his electric “blue green” or “aquamarine” eyes perfectly, and a spirit full of the most wonderful “joi de ve”.
When Morris knocked at the door, all of our spirits would rise. He always brought a bottle for Howard and Mud, and probably slipped them a a few dollars for groceries as well. With Morris, every other word was funny or kind, and he swept through the place like a happy tornado. However, there was one recurring behavior that had a really upsetting and ultimately, saddening effect on me.
For reasons that I still don’t understand, Morris, on his way out the door, would ALWAYS promise that the next time he came he would bring me a bicycle.
It happened that at that particular time there was nothing in the world that I wanted more than a bicycle, and I believed him. And of course, he never brought the bicycle.. Never explained, never apologized, and never varied, “Next time I come, I’m going to bring you a bicycle.”
At the time, It was like some cruel and confusing joke. More recently, I’ve begun to view it as some kind of clinical experiment.
- 1. Promise #1 unkept= deep-dissapointment
- 2. Promise #2 unkept= lesser deep-dissapointment
- 3. Promise #3 unkept= disappointment and wondering
- 4. Promise #4 unkept= self-pity and… what’s wrong why me?
- 5. Promise #5 unkept= anger and wondering what’s wrong with him?
- 6. Promise #6 unkept= wondering and anger, why doesn’t he stop?
- 7. Promise #7 unkept= Confused for life, what the heck did it mean?
Yo no se.
Or as Doc Pomus often said about life, love, and the music business, “s’cwazy Scottie, s’cwazy!”…Continued
Book 4. Continued…Tales of The Second Coming.5 And Book 1. Isla Grande .4
Book 4. Continued…Tales of The Second Coming .5
I am in the muddle of, ah…middle of, preparing for three very important occasions, and the April 15 tax deadline.
First, Sula’s One Hundred and Eighth Birthday, (the 22nd of April).
Second, The release of my new CD “The Virgin Islands Songs, The Musical. In Concert” Containing my new single “Surrender To The Sun” and
Third, A benefit Concert for COAST (The Council On Alcoholism and Drug Dependency, St. Thomas, St John) on April 25th at French Man’s Reef in St. Thomas, and…
yes, I filed online, just in the nickel of dime.
We have completed the production elements of “The Virgin islands Songs, The Musical, In Concert” and are now snaggled up in the manufacturing process.
Shari Brandt, Digitaldave (both from MAAC, the collective that I am involved with here in the states) and I spent much time on the cover last evening and that element looks great. Shari had a photo of a “Golden Sky” that she took in the Virgin Islands.
The photograph is wonderfully representative of lines from “The Virgin Islands Song”
The Virgin.Islands Song
Have you ever been, to a Virgin Island?
If you answer no, come let’s go come let’s go
Have you ever seen what Virgin Islands mean?
If you answer no come let’s go, come let’s go
In this world of gray on gray
I know where the rainbow day
Is born upon the golden sunrise
That scatters the stars turning diamonds to sky
Over Amalie… an emerald in the sea
Her perfumed mystery, bold as love longs to be.
Have you ever seen what Virgin Islands mean?
If you answer no come let’s go, come let’s go
In this world of grey on grey
I know where the rainbow day
Is born upon the golden sunrise
That scatters the stars turning diamonds to sky
Over sisters three… like emeralds in the sea
Their people’s history, bold as love, wild and free.
Have you ever been, to a Virgin Island?
If you answer no, come let’s go come let’s go
Have you ever seen what Virgin Islands mean?
If you answer no come let’s go, come let’s go
If you answer no, come let’s go, come let’s go…
And our upcoming single “Surrender To The Sun”.
Surrender To The Sun
Go down by the sea, surrender to the sun
Find the one you used to be, forget what time has done
Go down by the sea and heal your heart,
Too many memories are tearing you apart
Your eyes show you’re tired so
Of love of lose or win
Old friends know you’ve got to go
And let your heart begin again.
Instrumental
Your eyes show you’re tired so
Of love of lose or win
Old friends know you’ve got to go
And let your heart begin again.
Go down by the sea and heal your heart,
Too many memories are tearing you apart
Go down by the sea, surrender to the sun
Find the one you used to be, forget what time has done
Go down by the sea and heal your heart,
Too many memories are tearing you apart,
They’re tearing you apart…
We need to work quickly as I am scheduled to travel back to St. Thomas on Tuesday the 20th of April, for Sula’s Birthday Party on the 24th and the Benefit Concert at French Mans Reef on the 25th. I would like to have at least fifty copies of the new CD to take along. The CD is a double album so we are actually burning and printing 100 discs to make 50 copies.
The package looks great (Thanks to Shari Brandt of MAAC) the production quality is great (thanks to Digital Dave of MAAC) and the content is interesting and unusual.
(The printing and burning is being done as I write, by John E. a once well-known New York City recording engineer who is also a part of the exciting MAAC collective)
In terms of content, the CD contains what I believe to be a selection of good and appropriate “Virgin Island Songs” (of which there could have been three times as many) poetry, and lots of what we call (down in the Islands) “schupidness” aka (in the USA), as “humor”. I think that folks will find it interesting, amusing, and worth their while.
This is our first co-production with MAAC (The Middletown Area Arts Collective) and this afternoon the media committee is meeting to discuss and create an action plan for getting the product (most especially the single “Surrender To The Sun” to the public. We do believe that there is an audience for this song and this recording of it, and the trick is how to get the recording to its audience. Specifically,
1. How to get exposure for the recording.
2. How to make the recording available to those people who would like to have it
3. How to collect sufficient pennies, nickels, dimes and dollars from sales of the recording to be able to create more recordings…
We think that this recording is close to the perfect one to help us develop and establish a promotion and distribution (and collection?) process that we will be able to utilize for future products.
Of course we have no freakin’ “mowker balowker” (moolah boolah) (At last report it took an investment of $250,000 to get a hit) to pursue the traditional or established promotion and distribution processes. Which includes printing thousands of promotional copies and shipping them to radio stations, hiring an “independent record promotions person” who would “get our release to the top of the pile” hiring a publicist to get us as much “press” as needed, shipping copies to and getting the interest and attention of ”reviewers” inclined to “rave or even rant” about our humble offering, and mounting a “Promotional Tour” to get exposure and support for the release” so, we have to uncover and discover new ways to achieve our goal. Which is in a word,.. ah six words, “To make this record a hit”.
We are certainly interested to hear your ideas and to engage your help in this. Please write to me at scott@lilfishrecords.com with your thoughts, and suggestions. I (and we) thank you very much.
P.S someone is saying “Scott you’ve got to bribe folks! Urging me to offer “half a bag of Hershey’s Kisses as a grand prize” Continued…
Book 1. Isla Grande .4
I walk right up to it and stop and stare almost every day. The house on South Catherine, it was my sister Gale’s home. We were here together loving each other as much as a brother and sister can. What fun we had rambling through the house shouting or mumbling silliness in English, Spanish and Calypso, in and out of yesterday, today and tomorrow. (incidentally, that’s the fun of being a “grown up” you get to shout and laugh and yell as loud and as often as you want to, and turn the music way up high).
Who in the world could have imagined that Gale would have to split? Not to California, not to Florida, but completely. Clean gone outta here, off the Earth…Not here there or anywhere, and not back tomorrow either. Gone gone gone. It’s unbelievable.
So, I walk right up to the house and stop. Almost every day. I just can’t believe she’s gone.
She would have loved “The Virgin Islands Songs, The Musical”, The MAAC Collective (right here in her little town, Middletown,) and her brudder bonehead’s new recording of “Surrender To The Sun”. After all, she was the one. She was the one that first heard the whispers in the wind, that realized a new kind of music was being birthed, one that she and her little brother Bonehead, belonged to, and were born to be part of.
It was the beginning of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Bill Haley and The Comets, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, The Platters, The Moon glows, The Flamingos, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, their music, the idea that their music was OUR music, that spoke, that sang our freedom became our strength, the sweet salve, solace and succor for the soul, that we, that Gale and I, in that time and in our place, so desperately needed. Continued…
Book 1. Isla Grande.3 Continued…and Book 1. Cortijo Y The Symphonic Friction of Silk, Skin and Satin
Book 1. Isla Grande.3 Continued…
It’s difficult for me to write about our time in Puerto Rico, in Condado and our next move, to Ocean Park, because revisiting how I felt in that time and place is completely depressing, and frankly, I have worked long and hard to not feel that way any more. Depressing for me, for Gale, for Mud, for our little brother Larry (who was born during that time and started life sleeping in a drawer) for Howard, and for all of those suffering in poverty and humiliation everywhere.
Puerto Rico wasn’t the problem, Puerto Rico was an entire universe and the universe after all was beautiful. The problem was that we were living in the predictable consequences and painfully pitiful side effects of acute alcoholism, and were ignorant of that fact and further, powerless to do anything about it.
I have been both actively and acutely strung out on alcohol myself and I have been a child in the middle of the chaos of familial alcoholism, and I will tell you that in my experience, being a powerless kid is by far the worse of the two, because there was next to nothing that we could actually do about it. And…Just as alcoholism is a progressive condition, so too is the ever-growing psychological AND physiological malaise you experience as you feel progressively worse and worse about yourself and your ever more pathetic situation.
There were other kids in the building, well, mostly in the big breezy one, more “Yankee/Ricanio” kids who unfortunately tended towards the uppity condescension’s of “Americano/ Castiliano kids” rather than the more proletarian “egual egual” of regular “Ricanio” kids. I could list blow-by-blow, enough humiliations, embarrassments and disappointments to sink a ship, but going through it all Uno by Uno is just too friggin’ depressing and who needs any more of that.
I remember having a fight over something that one of the rich kids in the building said about me or my mother or my sister, or Howard and being too friggin’ weak to win. The boy sat on my scrawny chest holding my wrists taunting me and I was not able to budge the bastard even the slightest bit, it was among the most frustrating and humiliating things that I’ve ever experienced. I wasn’t a namby pamby, and was well used to rough and tumble in St. Thomas, but I was unable to contain my self, and I burst into tears of rage, frustration and humiliation.
Even then tho, I didn’t have the good sense to.. ah..I mean actually giving up was out of the question even then, so when the poor rich kid finally got tired of winning the blasted fight he had to let go and run for his life back into the rich peoples building and safety. Yep.
It’s funny how perfectly well I remember the helplessness that Gale and I felt watching friends laughing with one another, leaving for the movies, the amusement park, or the ball park and not being able to go. In fact, not even invited because they knew, and looked upon us with (God help us) pity, because we wouldn’t have the money to go, because we never had the money to go.
The flippy flappy fluppy flupping of the soles of your shoes and then the worn through cardboard, Gale’s cracked lense, broken and scotch taped glasses.
I remember with great sadness one Sunday morning with nothing whatsoever to eat and mother taking me to a tidal pool on Condado Beach, armed with a safety-pin on a string looking, hoping, to find something, anything to eat for breakfast, and failing completely. The little man that wasn’t, the little hero that couldn’t.
I can only imagine how Mud must have felt.
Life that way, is like living in some debilitating floor to ceiling drone that sucks the spirit, the light, the hope and the joy out of you. Leaving you more and more physically weak, and more and more psychologically vulnerable to insult and humiliation and more and more subject to the seeds of a focus less self-pity, a faceless anger and resentment.
I will mention that among other things we (our little family) got “boils”. Big fire red volcanic God awful biblical curse killer boils, that left you dizzy with pain and shame for days and weeks and when they finally exploded, well, you can imagine that mixture of revulsion and relief.
I got a hernia that went untreated for lack of moolah. Food poisoned by another Castilian Abuelita when her friendly grandson brought me to their house to play, she fed us lunch, and then told me to leave and to go directly home. Within the hour, alone in our apt, I was experiencing the worse sweats, trembling and abdominal pain of my life. I realized that if I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t be going back to play with her grandson anymore. Gale was sick in bed for many, many, many weeks with TB that went undiagnosed and untreated (years later it was diagnosed by the scarring on her lungs). Both Mud and Howard wound up in the hospital at the same time for a month (she having complications and then a baby, he having Delirium Tremens). Followed by a long stay in the VA, leaving Gale and I to have a grand adventure taking care of ourselves on our own in Puerto Rico at 9 1/2 and 11.
Of course the first thing to go by the wayside was school, (we were going to “La Escuela de Santa Teresita” on Loiza Street at the time and we could never afford the tuition anyway).
My job was to go out every day looking for, rather “hunting and gathering”, Coca-Cola bottles to turn in for deposit and for the pennies thrown away (two at a time) in the cellophane wrapping of cigarette packages. Cigarettes sold for twenty-eight cents a pack in cigarette machines and the two cents change was stuck in the wrapper. With my earnings Gale and I would go to the store and buy sugar and flour. All the ingredients we needed to make our favorite dishes, fried sugar and fried flour cakes.
We would set the table like civilized children and gobble up our dinner as if we were on top of the world.
However, we lived in acute fear that someone would tell the authorities that we were living all by ourselves and we would be caught and sent to…God knows where.
Fortunately, the only adult interventions came in the form of the bright red apples or neatly wrapped sandwiches or containers of Spanish rice that we would occasionally find leaning against the door when we would come back to the apartment from our flour and sugar runs. Continued…
Book 1. Cortijo Y The Symphonic Friction of Silk, Skin and Satin
I recently attended an interesting event in observance of “Virgin Islands/Puerto Rico Friendship Day” a discussion of the impact of Puerto Rican music on the music and culture of the Virgin Islands. For those of you who don’t know much about the music of Puerto Rico, it is as varied as “Trio Los Panchos” is from “Cortojo Y su Combo con Ishmael Rivera” with every kind of Jibaro (Puerto Rican “hillbilly”) thrown in for double good measure.
Afro-Cuban is more well-known in the states, and I have nothing negative to say about “La Muisca de Cuba” but being “all but Borincan” my self I must confess a personal affinity for “La Musica De Puerto Rico”.
I am not on the panel this year, but the influence of La Musica De Puerto Rico on my music and on my excitement with the idea of making music, is very powerful. I am very happy to offer my recording of “El Gringito” as a demonstration of that, it is a classic Jibaro style song and arrangement, and our Guitar based recording (as opposed to the piano based one) of “Surrender To The Sun” as partial confirmation of the fact that we’ve got a serious case of Borenquen in the soul of the Virgin Islands. (That is the great Jeff Medina playing those beautiful guitar lines).
The great Emile Francis of “Milo And The Kings” ( by far the most popular virgin Islands band of the last fifty years, was all but a Ricanio himself, and the band (with many players with familial ties to Puerto Rico) was second only to Cortijo when it came to full blast sizzling hot Mambo and Meringue.
In 1959 and 60 Tuts and Anibal and I were working at a dance hall that doubled as a skating rink or vice versa. “The Carousel”.
Skating was/is great fun, and being a skate boy/bartender at fourteen and fifteen, was certainly the best of both worlds. Leaping and spinning and flying around the rink at speeds exceeding eighty or a hundred miles per hour (I don’t care what the physicists say about the limitations of ball bearings in circa 1960 skates, or resistance of masonite floors, skinny kid legs and the self-limiting properties of all the atoms involved, as conclusive proof that actual speeds were probably no more than one-third of those claimed) we were flying and when you dipped too low and slid too far on a turn, smashing your shinbone into the sharp edge of a door jamb or support pillar, you knew, and everyone else that heard the crash-bang and the screamin’ and cussin’, would agree, that you had to have been doing at least a hundred.
Sweet “styling” for the teenaged girls, and being ever-present and accounted for on the Saturday Night Rock and Roll radio show that originated at the center of the universe, the skating rink, was great great fun.
But when “Cortijo Y Su Combo Con Ishmael Rivera”, was there, and the scratchy forty fives were replaced by the live blasting trumpets and blaring saxophonicas and banging timbales Congas and Bongos, guiro, maracas, clavos, Guitarra, bass and crazy piano along with simply the best of the best singers in Ishmael Rivera, all together “tedando” the hottest mambo in sixty galaxies, and the giant mirror ball (on top of the rum) had the room and everyone in it spinning in eight directions at once, and the mounting scent of the sweat of pure passion and the perfumey fumes rose up to your brain and voodooed into it as tight as a Turkish towel and the sandpaper sound of oh so tightly wrapped and bursting at the seams, silk and satin bottoms frictioning and bumping, rubbing, and sliding one against the next ‘til the place was about to spontaneously combust like a flambo..
All a lusty young lad boy had to do, was solo dance himself out to the middle of the floor where he would find himself transported to heaven. Crushed breathless amongst and betwixt the mambo frenzied bums of five hundred panting, heaving mamacitas. Each cheek and Chica fully charged, and determined to out shake her neighbor… demonstrating for their dance partners and every one else in the world (or rather, anyone that dared to look) exactly who had the hottest haunches and the sweetest salsa pot, and further, exactly how these endowments could be expected to perform as soon as time and place conspired to align and allow them to do what they could do. (what we used to call “de ting”)
And, perhaps most importantly, and paradoxically beyond the immediate promise of things to come, was the clear once and for always illus/demon/stration of what “the poor pendejo who wouldn’t proclaim his love and fling down his life for her, this very night and forever more”, would and could surely count on missing every day and night of the rest of his miserable God forsaken time on Earth.
Many more than one of Uncle Sam’s poor intoxicated swabs found themselves swept up in this divine, elemental maelstrom, missed his boat and was sunk. Other wise good men who have had to answer questions like these ever since, “Son, how could you disgrace the family by getting a dishonorable discharge?” and “Dad, how long did you have to stay in the brig when they said you deserted from the Navy?” and “Dad do you think they’ll ever forget what you did and let you get a good job and move us out of this trailer park?”
I suspect that the concerned family members are quite puzzled when an odd sweet smile followed by a faraway glazed look is the only answer they get.
We of course had our own band that (as soon as we figured out how to play anything beyond “Perfidia” and “Ruby Dooby Doo”) would be just like Cortijo.
Tuts played the trumpet, I was the singing sax man, Anibal, played “an instrument to be named later” and our friend Guillermo who played the conga, was so taken by the excitement that we think he ran off to Old San Juan, where he may have tried a “stick up a mulberia” to get a set of timbales, and is probably still in La Princessa Prison, just outside of Rio Piedras.
Anyway, I don’t think I will raise my hand and try to offer that kind of testimony from the floor this time, but by God when it’s my turn to be invited onto the dias, I will have this and much more to say. Yes indeed,
Scott Fagan's Mem.wa? 