Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz (Harper Collins 2020)

 

Richard Linklater: When I was in high school, our school had a ’50s day, where you could dress up 1950s and roll cigarettes up in your sleeve. My uncle had been a teenager in the ’50s, and he was like, “You guys like the ’50s, but let me tell you, the ’50s sucked.” I took that in for Dazed, like, yeah, the ’70s kind of suck, too.

Tom Junod: Many people who grew up in the ’70s felt that they had missed out on growing up in the ’60s. Linklater nails that so accurately. The second-phase baby boomers, the people who came of age in the ’70s, were almost Gen X precursors, because we felt that the real meat of the revolution had happened before we got there. In the ’60s, people had protested. They had stopped a war. They  had pioneered using drugs. They had pioneered rock music.

By the time that stuff made its way to us, it was simply as lifestyle choices. You weren’t making a political statement by smoking a joint. The few times we did protest, we were already self-aware enough to look at it ironically. The movie nails that with perfection.

Chris Barton: By the time you get to 1976, when Dazed takes place, the Beatles are done. The Rolling Stones haven’t had a great album in years. The economy was not great. In a couple of years, Carter would use the word “malaise” in his televised speech from the White House. I could see how you might think the best stuff has passed you by.

Tom Junod: My generation was guilty of nostalgia way before they got old. I was class of 1976. When I think of my own experiences in the ’70s, it’s like, Happy Days was on. Sha Na Na was an act that people my age went and paid money for, even though it did not in any way memorialize their own time. American Graffiti was a really popular movie with people who graduated high school in 1976 rather than in 1962. And it was the same way with Dazed being popular with people who graduated in the ’90s.

Brian Raftery: When they were making Dazed, I don’t think they realized there was ’70s nostalgia on the horizon. By the early ’90s, the ’60s revival had reached a saturation point. We had The Wonder Years. We had Oliver Stone relitigating the entire ’60s, whether it was Vietnam or the Doors. I think the height of the ’60s nostalgia was an infomercial for a record set called Freedom Rock, with two grizzled hippies who were like, “Turn it up, man!”

There was a weird rewrite of the ’60s because the boomers had taken over the media, and these guys were like, “Hey, we were the second-greatest generation!” and it became insufferable by the end of the ’80s. So Dazed was definitely a turning point. It was like, the ’70s? That sounds cool.

Richard Linklater: I think teenagers are looking to escape the misery of their own time, whatever that time is. It’s like, “It had to have been better back then.”

Before We Was We: The Making of Madness by Madness (with Tom Doyle) (Virgin Books 2019)

 

LEE: Roxy Music were a big influence. Myself, Mike and Chris went to see them at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park when the Stranded album had just come out. We saw David Essex going in, with a blonde lady friend, and they were dressed to the nines. Our mate John Jones goes, ‘He’s got a bit of a flash car.’ He had some convertible Merc and I can’t remember if the roof was down or not, but I know we got in it. Inside, he had one of those new-fangled eight-track tape players. We thought, ‘Oh, they must cost a fortune.’ So, we ended up having several of his eight-track tapes away.

Then, we bunked into the gig. Supporting was Leo Sayer. I got on someone’s shoulders – probably Mike’s, because he’s tall – and hauled myself up onto a window ledge, because I’d noticed it was on the latch. As I climbed up and looked in this window, there’s Leo Sayer, putting his makeup on. He’s got that clown’s outfit on that he wore around that time. He had all the gear on and one red cheek. He turned round, and I went, ‘Can you let us in?’ He was like, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’ I’m going, ‘We’ve come to see you, though, Leo …’ Have we fuck! But he said, ‘I can’t, obviously,’ and I descended back down.

MARK: Lee always told me that Leo Sayer mimed, ‘I can’t let you in,’ in Marcel Marceau style …

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne , Peter Pavia (Harper Collins 2005)

 

If You Can Make It There, You Can Make It Anywhere

NEW YORK CITY

1969–1970

HARRY REEMS (PORN STAR): In 1969, everybody in the East Village was going to make it as an actor. Whether you went to an anti–Vietnam War rally or a macrobiotic restaurant, all the talk was about auditions.

 

MARILYN CHAMBERS (PORN STAR): I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, about fifty miles west of New York City. When I was about sixteen, I learned how to write my mother’s name on notes to get out of school—and then I’d take the train into the city to go to auditions.

My whole growing up consisted of me in front of a mirror playing records like West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie. I really wanted to be Ann-Margret, to tell you the truth.

 

ERIC EDWARDS (PORN STAR): While I was in college in Waco, Texas, I got a scholarship from ABC Television to go to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. They auditioned twenty thousand people from all over the country, and I think they picked sixteen people. I mean, this was the big point in my career, it was like a stepping stone—I was getting letters from Lillian Gish, from the president of ABC, from all these top executives saying, “You have received a scholarship to come to New York.”

In fact, Lillian Gish handed me my diploma. Henry Fonda was there backstage; I spoke to him in awe. I was, like, melting.

 

GEORGINA SPELVIN (PORN STAR): One of my first experiences in New York was when the state employment office sent me to see about a modeling job. It was a big, high-class studio, and I had to see someone with one of those hairdresser names: “Mr. Charles” or “Mr. Gary.”

After everyone else had left, he brought me into the studio and—through the course of taking many pictures—he eventually got me very drunk and nude and then he balled me. I don’t even remember how I got home; I passed out midway through the thing. But I never got the chance to tell him I had the clap, and I wondered how long it took him to find out and connect it to me.

The Red Machine: Liverpool in the '80s: The Players' Stories by Simon Hughes (Mainstream Publishing 2013)

On one occasion, Bates’s ego got the better of him. In the tunnel at Stamford Bridge ahead of a match and with a loose ball at his feet, he asked former Liverpool left-back Joey Jones to tackle him. So Jones did, leaving Bates in a heap.

‘Joey was a tough lad,’ Spackman says. ‘He and Mickey Thomas were nutters. They drove down to London every other day for training from their home in North Wales. Every Monday morning, John Neal would come into the dressing-room and say, “Sorry, lads, training’s been put back an hour – Mickey and Joey are stuck on the motorway.”

‘Because Ken Bates wouldn’t pay for them to stay in a hotel, they’d sleep in the referee’s room at Stamford Bridge on a Friday night before a game. It was a big room with a TV and a sofa, but not the ideal place to sleep if you’re a footballer preparing for kick-off. They’d walk up the King’s Road on a Saturday morning for a fry-up then go back to the ground and wait for everybody else to arrive. It was a ridiculous arrangement.’

Stamford Bridge was hardly a place you’d wish to watch a game of football, never mind spend the night.

‘It was big but a bit of a dump,’ Spackman continues. ‘There was one huge stand, but the rest of the ground seemed so far away from the pitch because of the greyhound track. You needed 25,000 in there to create any sort of atmosphere. The pitch was terrible, too. I was used to a nice bowling-green surface at Bournemouth, but at Chelsea – a club then in the Second Division – the pitch was a dustbowl. It made it difficult to play pretty football. Over the years, that’s probably why Liverpool found it difficult going there.

(From the chapter, 'SOUTHERNER, Nigel Spackman')

Men in White Suits: Liverpool FC in the 1990s - The Players' Stories by Simon Hughes (Bantam Press 2015)

Mangotsfield United saw enough in Tanner to ask him to training, where he first met the late Ralph Miller, a legendary non-league manager, who was a builder by trade.

‘I enjoyed playing under Ralph more than Bobby Gould, Gerry Francis, Kenny Dalglish or Graeme Souness,’ Tanner beams. ‘He loved players that got stuck in, and I was one of them. He was an old-school psychologist, a bit like Bill Shankly, I suppose. The funny stories are endless.’

Tanner recalls one.

‘There was a player that he desperately wanted to sign for Mangotsfield. Problem was, the fella lived in South Wales. So he drove over the bridge in his van with a bicycle in the back. He pleaded with the fella at his front door. “Look, I’ve cycled all the  way over here from Bristol to sign you.” The lad looked at his bike. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You must really want me.” So he signed the forms there and then. Ralph rode around the corner and chucked his bike in the back of the van before driving home.

‘When I was about eighteen, we decided to go on our first lads’ holiday to Magaluf. To prepare for the holiday I decided to get myself fit, so I went out running every day – did sit-ups, press-ups, the lot. It was the fittest I’ve ever been. After our first pre-season session back at Mangotsfield, I got out of the shower looking all bronzed. “Fuck me,” Ralph went. “You’ve got a body like Tarzan and a prick like Jane!”’

In the mid-eighties, Bristol Rovers were, as Tanner puts it, ‘in financial shit’ and needing players that would play for practically nothing, so manager Bobby Gould scoured the Gloucestershire and Somerset county leagues for undiscovered talent.

‘Rovers signed Gary Penrice, Phil Purnell, Gary Smart and myself from Mangotsfield, all for the princely sum of two floodlight bulbs. I can still remember Ralph turning up at Eastville Stadium while all of us were playing in a reserve game, shouting at the top of his voice, “Where’s my money, Gouldy?” That was Ralph all over. In later years he came to Anfield to watch me play and said how proud he was of me, which touched me, coming from such a hard man.'

The People of Providence: A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants by Tony Parker (Picador 1983)

A fair-haired young woman in a gaberdine mackintosh crossing the pedestrian shopping precinct in Robins Walk stopped with a polite smile.

— Sorry love but if it’s insurance we’ve got more than enough thanks.

A book? About Providence Estate? Go on, you’re joking! Really? Blimey, that’ll be a job! I must read it, when’s it coming out? Oh I’ll not be here by then I shouldn’t think. Mm? Well, if I could think of one word to tell someone what a place is like. ..

‘Mixed’? Well yes, that’s one word for it, I think that’s about right that is, ‘mixed’. ‘Mixed’ — how do I think he meant? Well you know . . . I mean, there’s all sorts of people here all together, isn't there? I should think that’s what he meant. You’ve got people who do what you might call hard physical sort of jobs, those that work in the docks or on the building sites — the what do you call them, ‘manual workers’ is it? Then you’ve got the people who work in offices and banks and shops and that. Then there’s those who're the sort of posh ones, posh jobs like lawyers, there’s quite a few of that sort lives around here, it's surprising. And teachers — and old people — and families — people living on their own — and kids, a big lot of kids. Happy people and sad people and odd people and peculiar people — a big sort of mixture, so that’s absolutely the right word for it that is, yes . . . ‘mixed’.

An elderly man with the collar of his overcoat turned up, coming out of the library, two books by Hammond Innes under his arm.

— It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to try and summarize a place such as Providence Estate in a hundred or a thousand words, so it would be totally impossible to do it in one.

Certainly if somebody has already said to you ‘mixed’ I would say that was an appropriate word, certainly. I couldn’t say precisely what they might have meant, but I should have thought a moment’s glance round would have made it clear because it is instantly visible, isn’t it, how mixed it is?

You have the group of tower blocks over there, then those long six-storey things, I think they call them linear’ blocks over there; then in that direction there are those small maisonette-type low buildings of flats. And if you go through that way you come to the old houses that have been refurbished; and beyond those, ones that aren’t going to be done up and are scheduled for demolition, though heaven knows when they’re going to get on with it. And the prefabs of course, scattered around here and there. . . . So I’d say yes, high-rise towers, long blocks, modern small flats, old places done up, others dilapidated . . . a large ’mixed’ area very obviously, no one could quarrel with the word. And not at all unpleasing to the eye; all in all, not at all.

You’re welcome sir, good afternoon.

Twelve perhaps thirteen years old, the small boy in a royal blue blazer and grey flannels with a too-small cap on his head and a satchel over his shoulder looked thoughtfully into the distance.

— ‘Mixed’? What did they mean, ‘mixed’ how, what sort of way? Did they mean the people or the buildings or what? Funny word to use about the estate isn’t it, really; could mean all sorts of things couldn’t it, to different people? ‘Mixed’. Mm, yeh. . . .

He went on staring into the distance. After a while he began slowly nodding his head.

— Yeh, well, if you come to think of it, that’s quite a good word. I mean like where we are now, standing on the footpath in the middle of the grass . . . you see over there’s the towers, back that way there’s the flats, then there’s the shops and Robins Walk. So you could say if you wanted to that over there where the buildings are, that’s like town, and here where we are, with the grass and the trees, this is like country isn’t it? I mean if you don’t look that way you can’t see buildings and if you don’t listen too hard you can’t hear traffic. So it’s all like a mixture between town and country, right? Not built over everywhere, but not like out in a wood or something either. ‘Mixed' is a very good word, I’d say that was about right yeh.

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein (Abrams Books 2014)

Lori Majewski: Not sure if you realize it, JB [Jonathan Bernstein], but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.

Punk Rock: An Oral History by John Robb (PM Press 2006)

Billy Bragg

We read about the Jam. We could relate to where Weller was coming from, so we went to see them and that transformed us. Whereas the Damned and the Sex Pistols seemed like they were like a parody, taking what the Eddie and the Hot Rods were doing and taking the piss - a bit like the Darkness now. The Jam, when we saw them at the Nashville Rooms, seemed to really mean it. Weller had the words ‘Fire and Skill’ on his amp. They had skinny ties and suits; they looked good. We thought they were part of that Wilko Johnson/Barry Masters white working-class suburban music scene, compared to the Pistols being art school tossers really. The Pistols’ fans also wore swastikas - that really pissed me off as well. I didn’t like that idea at all.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum (Penguin 2011)

“A WHOPPING, STEAMING TURD”

THE WORST VIDEO EVER MADE

BILLY SQUIER, artist: I came up with “Rock Me Tonite” on holiday in Greece, swimming off Santorini. I came out of the water and said to my girlfriend, “I’ve got a hit for the next record.”

MICK KLEBER: “Rock Me Tonite” is often ranked as one of the worst music videos of all time.

RUDOLF SCHENKER: I liked Billy Squier very much, but then I saw him doing this video in a very terrible way. I couldn’t take the music serious anymore.

STEVE LUKATHER: Billy Squier was a cool guy. I worked on one of his records. But that video killed his career.

PHIL COLLEN: The first big tour Def Leppard did in the States was in ’83, as the opening act for Billy Squier. A year later, Squier learned the hard way that rock singers shouldn’t skip through their bedroom, ripping their shirts off. That’s in the first chapter of the rock handbook. You should know that straight off the bat.

BILLY SQUIER: I had an idea for the video, based on the ritual of going to a concert. If we admit it, when we’re getting ready to go out, we’re checking our clothes and our hair. So I wanted to show me doing that in my apartment, then cut back and forth with kids getting ready to go to a Billy Squier concert and sneaking out of the house. In the last chorus, they get to where they’re going, I get to where I’m going, we’re all in it together.

The first person we went to is Bob Giraldi, the biggest video director in the world. I sent him the song, he loved it, we had a meeting, everything was good. Three weeks later, he called my office and said, “I’m out.” He decided it wasn’t something he’d want his kids to see. I was like, “Huh?”

BOB GIRALDI: Having seen the video, he was right: I should have been the director.

MICK KLEBER: Giraldi said he was routinely turning down projects that were underfunded. He was interested, if we could enlarge the budget. Compared to other labels, Capitol budgets were conservative. Bob understood and politely bowed out.

Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now, As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It by Craig Taylor (Harper Collins 2011)

LUDMILA OLSZEWSKA

Former Londoner

She has recently returned to Warsaw after spending a year working in a pub in Kilburn. Her voice through the telephone is raspy, and I can hear her daughter playing contentedly behind her.

I REMEMBER THE ENGLISH WEATHER, English cigarettes, gray skies, but sometimes beautiful skies, Oxford Street, Topshop. Irish men in my pub all day. They were so sad but also very funny, and also very respectful. They ask me what I was in London for. I said to them: money. I asked them what they came to London for. They said: money. They sit still for so long, all day, and some tell you things at the end of the night that you don’t want to hear. I remember the music, the light of the pub, the Guinness, the waiting for the Guinness. That was one of the first things I learned in London: to wait for the Guinness with them.

I would make time each day to call my daughter, Alexandra, who was four and living with my mother in Warsaw. I would text my mother to make sure it was a good time. It was hard to hear my daughter from so far away. She comes on the phone, she doesn’t always speak to me, and I said, “Come on, say something,” and there was her breathing and other small sounds but sometimes no words, and that is so hard to hear. Just sounds. It made me wonder if she knew it was me. She did. That is when you think, what am I doing in London? How much do I make? What do I have to do before I go home?

I remember the old churches, the London Eye, Shoot Up Hill, and many women who are well-dressed, though not in Kilburn. My money, my toothbrush, my mobile phone, my sim card, my makeup, my shampoo, some clothes, some clothes I never took out of my bag. Primrose Hill once for an afternoon. I ate my lunch there. The buses. Always listening to Polish people on the buses. They think that no one understands them.

“Where are you going?” they asked at the pub when I left, and I said, “I am going home.” They knew about my daughter because they sat in the pub all day. “Don’t leave us,” one man said t

GEORGE IACOBESCU

CEO, Canary Wharf Group PLC

The Tower of London, that is the dividing line. William the Conqueror created the Tower: to the west was money and pleasure, and to the east was poverty, and it is still here. It tells the story of London, that for so long all this area had no transport. When we started building Canary Wharf in 1987, the Jubilee Line didn’t exist, and the DLR was just one line here and a bit of line going to the Isle of Dogs. That was the whole transport. How could it be that a city as rich as London has the whole eastern part of the town with no transport? How could you expect all these people to go to work? I mean it was a reservoir of cheap labor, but you didn’t even give them the opportunity to be slaves.

Today Canary Wharf is 15 million feet and there’s another 10 million feet to go. So it’s two and a half times the size that we looked at the first time. Canary Wharf is the most important thing to happen to London in the past one hundred years, and probably Crossrail is going to be the next one. It has an extension that goes to London Bridge, which makes a big difference; it starts creating the network of transport. We designed the Jubilee Line in such a way that it intersects with every other line. It is just two steps to come to Canary Wharf. Crossrail will change London forever, because a lot of the companies in Canary Wharf or in the City would like to use a lot of the manpower coming from the east. They are more economical, not having to pay the rents of Kensington, Chelsea, and Mayfair. And those areas have different salary expectations. So the labor force coming from the east is cheaper. The east of London will become the dormitory of London, because what London is missing is the Queens and the Brooklyn of New York. You don’t have a place where the nurses and the teachers and the policemen and the firefighters can live very close to the city. If they all have to travel two or three hours to get to work, how productive are they and how tired are they by the time they get home? So the east of London is going to be where all these things happen.

Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (Back Bay Books 2003)

JAMES DOWNEY:
I used to walk down the street with Bill Murray and have to stand there patiently for twenty minutes of like drooling and ass-kissing by people who would come up to him. And Murray would point to me and say, “Well, he’s the guy who writes the stuff,” but they would continue to ooh and ahh over him. Murray can be a real asshole, but the thing that keeps bringing me back to defend him is I’ve seen him be an asshole to people who could affect his career way more often than to people who couldn’t. Harry Shearer will shit on you to the precise degree that it’s cost-free; he’s a total ass-kisser with important people.
Back when neither of us was making much money, Murray and I would take these cheap flights to Hawaii. We had to stop in Chicago, and at the airport there’d be these baggage handlers just screaming at the sight of him, and he would take enormous amounts of time with them, and even get into like riffs with them. I enjoyed it, because it was really entertaining. We went down to see Audrey Peart Dickman once, and the toll guy on the Jersey turnpike looked in and recognized Murray and went crazy. We stopped and people were honking and Bill was doing autographs for the guy and his family.
I’ve yet to meet the celebrity who was universally nice to everyone. But the best at it is Murray — even to people who had nothing to do with career or the business

(P.248)
FRED WOLF:
Farley and this girl on the show were going out. She was really smart and pretty, and Farley really liked her a lot. But she couldn’t put up with any more of Farley’s stuff, so they broke up. And then she started dating Steve Martin. So one day Farley comes to me and he says, “Fred, I hear that she’s going out with some guy. What can you tell me about it?” And, you know, nobody wanted to tell Chris Farley that she was dating anyone else, particularly Steve Martin. So I just said, “Well, I haven’t heard. I don’t know.” And he goes, “I know she’s seeing somebody. You’ve got to tell me who it is.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to get in the middle of any of that kind of stuff.” And Farley said, “Well, she may find somebody better looking than me, or she might find somebody richer than me, but she’s not going to find anybody funnier than me.” And what I couldn’t tell him was, he was wrong on all three counts. He had hit the hat trick of failure. Steve Martin was richer, better looking, and even funnier. (P.306)
BOB ODENKIRK:
I mean, the whole thing was weird to me. The whole thing. To me, what was fun about comedy and should have been exciting about Saturday Night Live was the whole generational thing, you know, a crazy bunch of people sittin’ around making each other laugh with casual chaos and a kind of democracy of chaos. And to go into a place where this one distant and cold guy is in charge and trying to run it the way he ran it decades ago is just weird to me (P.463)

Division Street: America by Studs Terkel (New Press 1967)

I think the poor class of people, both Negro and white, as bad as I hate to say this, being a union man, I believe they've forgotten a lot of these things. In those days, if you had a car transfer, nobody threw away a transfer. They would put it where somebody else could get it. Nobody threw away a cigarette butt. It was awful hard to find a cigarette, but if a guy had one, he would choke it and give it to the next guy. Everybody was very friendly at that time.

Today, based on the war economy and the unions, some people make a few dollars, and the feeling, the atmosphere is different. Labor's respectable now, it's status quo. If you fight against these guys, you're labeled. Fear. A lot of fellas want to know how come George Meany don't walk together with Martin Luther King, you know, in these demonstrations. We evade the question. (Laughs.)

There was a meeting downtown where all the business agents were, labor leaders. I thought they were gonna pull Mayor Daley's pants down and kiss him. These guys go overboard. And they were raising a question of why we wasn't organizin' more. Why there wasn't more than five Negroes out of two, three hundred guys! So I finally got up enough courage to get the floor. (Laughs.)

So I told 'em, "Looking around the room here, you guys got all diamond rings, manicures." Honest, I didn't know Bill Lee* had a telephone in his Mark IV, air-conditioned, chauffeur, everything. (Laughs.) And I said, "The image of so-called labor leaders is not what it was in the old days. Now you can't tell 'em from a businessman." So they accepted the criticism.

('Lew Gibson' speaking to Studs Terkel about the contrast between the hungry thirties and the prosperous sixties.)

* Bill Lee was the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor at the time.

Listening In

Socialism Or Your Money Back blog carries a nice wee piece about the late, great Studs Terkel.