The 21^st Century Magazine,
at South Florida's www.miami-dade-online.com.

Before The Road Ended - 2, Randy Burns
Becoming Aware

We took it upon ourselves to keep the benefit going and the money coming in.  All of us wore a Styrofoam McGovern hat with the old fashioned brims.  At some period during that long afternoon, our piano player Dave Tweedy took a bite out of his hat brim.  The bite left a half moon shape with perfect teeth marks.  It looked cool. 

We had worked our asses off all afternoon for only the thought of political change.  No one really gave Old George a chance in hell.  While leaving the benefit and returning to our bus, the man that was running this moneymaker came running after me yelling my name. "Hey Randy, one of your guys took a bite out of a McGovern hat."  

"Really," I said, "just how should we punished him?"     

"Well they cost a dollar seventy-five and I want it!"  

"You want a dollar seventy-five from us after all we did?"     

"The dollar seventy-five, I want it from you." 

I told him to go to hell, turned around and headed back toward the bus.  The little shit kept yelling at me, "I want my dollar seventy-five, now!" 

I'd taken more than enough.  I turned around and went after him.  It was the last thing that little snot expected.  I had just about caught him when my own band jumped me.  They held on to me tightly too, until that McGovern Campaign worker could find a safe place to hide.      

In a short time I was okay, I was cool.  We got on the Skydog Bus and had a beer, smoked a joint and left politics behind us.  We tried to help out playing for free all day.  Still that weasel wanted money from us to pay for one Styrofoam McGovern hat!  That took balls.  Those same balls that continually harassed me didn't seem to slow him down any.  He was a fast and determined man in the opposite direction as well, running from me screaming he didn't mean it over his shoulder.      

What the hell, we'd done our part for the cause and now we were on our way back to New Haven. Everything began for me in New Haven, in 1965.  Good or bad, that's where it started.  My music, politics, the movement against injustice and inequality, and of course "The War."       

Having just finished that mismanaged McGovern Benefit in Hartford, we drove our bus back into the center of New Haven.  Something strange happened. Time began to loosen.  While the band was parking the bus, I was no longer with them.  I had just parked my old '58' Ford Fairlane over on Wall Street.  I stepped out of the car across from a folk club called "The Exit."  With my hair extremely short, I just stood there for a moment holding my first acoustic guitar.  It was 1965 again, when 'Folk was King.'  I guessed that time decided to splinter for some reason, making many life times change zones and order.  I did wonder what the band was doing, but I'd find that out in seven years.      

So I crossed Wall Street and attempted to enter "The Exit."  I was seventeen, but you needed to be eighteen to get into the place.  I wanted this.  I wanted to know what was really going on, how the other side thought, and I wanted to sing.  Everything came hand in hand in the 60s.  An incredible period of awareness swept over this country, and that awareness demanded social change and an end to the "War in Vietnam."  We became the children of our parents against the Government.  Just who in the hell were we to question our Government?  Unfortunately, that was the way our Government saw it as well.      

There was a peephole on the top part of the 'Exit' door.  After I'd knocked, it was carefully opened on tiny hinges.  There was an eye for a moment followed by part of a mouth.  The man on "peephole duty" began asking me for proof of age.  Then he caught sight of my guitar and let me right in apologetically!     

I began to meet all kinds of people and performers with minds of their own, who had good songs for every politically ill situation.  As I've said, this all came to me in 1965 and never did leave completely.  How much is still there?  I can't really be sure, but nothing would surprise me.      

I met a performer named Jim McGrath on that first night in The Exit.  He came in the door with snow all over him, walked right up on stage and rattled the hell out of everyone.  His performance was so powerful that his eyes shot flames and his vocal passion during each song never wavered for a second.  He believed in it all.  Here was a man with convictions.  He sang and spoke them, he lived them, they were his. 

I was proud to become his friend.  I spent many a night at McGrath's place, with his wife Lynn and their young son Brendan.  Somehow, I never got in the way.  A whole gang of us would often sing and recite poetry around McGrath's old fireplace on some of the coldest winter nights I remember.  Mr. Auden, Ms. Teasdale, even Dr. Seuss came to life for me in that room with the logs burning.  I listened and learned about the political counterculture, what they stood for and against.  I was only seventeen, but it had definitely come time to start thinking about this and how I felt.  I came to embrace the entire movement and its causes easily.  It was the solid reasoning, coupled with blatant injustice I saw with my own eyes that did it.  I don't know why that wasn't enough for every decent person in this country, they all knew it was there.  But it wasn't enough for them to get involved, and so began an era that's never been fully understood.

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