The ratio of guns to people in...

…The Palace on Washington Street in Boston around 1962 was probably something like 1:4, every 4th person was armed to their gold teeth and if you added the number of people herein who had more than one piece tucked away in their 3-piece zoot suits, the numbers surely went up…

I, wet behind the ears and kind of a hick/doofus kid from Vermont who’d seen more cows than black people, was unarmed in those days, and I was out of my element in this pre-Combat Zone, nefarious den of iniquity but I soon found my equilibrium in a fifth of gin (later lost it in that same Bombay bottle) and got comfortable while the legendary William Henry Robinson Jr. from Roxbury, a classmate of mine at Cambridge, conducted my break-in tour to The Blues, and gave me a sneak peek at one side of black Night Life, a tour I’ve continued ever since. I’ve had The Blues for 38 years now. Before this night I thought it was just a color.

…and whereas I knew a Hammond was an organ I didn’t know a Hammond B with Jimmy Smith or Jimmy McGriff on the ivories was light years away from Catholic Catherine Clifford’s doleful organ playing in church, light years away with a cultural divide wide as a Nebraska horizon, not to mention it’s quite a ways from ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to ‘Got My Mojo Workin’…

Later featured on the front cover of a crime investigation report ordered by the City of Boston, there it was in all it’s tawdry splendor, in living, peeling color – ‘The Palace’, a misnomer if ever there was one, but as for crime, ahhhh, there was plenty to go around…there wasn’t much you couldn’t get at this place after midnight, which I discovered during ten months of projectile drinking, laying the groundwork for a decades-long life of dissolution lost in Subterranea.
…then along came Urban Renewal and The Palace got paved and turned into a parking lot. I had to further my musical education elsewhere. In The Green Door, Carrie Nation’s, The Last Call Saloon, Nick’s et al…on and on the learning process went & goes in a variety of venues and classrooms. It’s all school this life, every minute of life is in a classroom of one kind or another no matter what you are doing. As far as I know the learning process goes on to the very brink of the grave.