Another dating for positive "uptight," if anyone cares

[Mark Mandel]

I'm beat! Wilson, your testimony from a relevant time and subculture
convinces me.

m a m

On Feb 4, 2008 2:26 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> The album, "Up Tight!' contains a piece with the title, "Up Tight"
> with no exclamation point. It's a cool, relaxed, bluesy-jazz
> instrumental. It doesn't sound emotionally uptight to me, but, of
> course, that's merely my opinion. IAC, it's *far* less phrenetic than
> the Little Stevie Wonder song, as would be expected of cool jazz.
>
> It's strange that Brooks Bros. would be the epitome of square in NYC.
> West of the Mississippi - among blacks, IAC - the ideal was to be
> dressed *up," not down. A stud who wanted to jump sharp and be - not
> get - laid dressed in an Arrow pin-collar shirt with a silk rep tie, a
> three-piece Hart, Schaffner & Marx suit, over-the-calf-length socks
> held up by garters, Stacy-Adams shoes ("States"), a Stutson or Dobbs
> stingy-brim lid, wore a mustache, if he could grow one, and carried
> the stereotypical knife. A kind of modified zoot suit called a
> "three-button roll" or its "one-button roll" variant worn with a shirt
> with a "Mr. B" (Billy Eckstein-style) rolled collar with a
> standard-brim fedora was also cool, though a bit déclassé. "Rogues"
> tended to prefer the latter style. However, wearing the former style
> didn't necessarily mean that a cat was not a bad motherfucker who
> could study kick ass when this was called for.
>
> And note that I'm describing middle-school and high-school kids as
> well as college students and young adults. In college, it used be a
> joke amongst the colored that, on rainy days, when classes ended,
> white cats in sweatsocks, penny-loafers, chinos, and open-collar dress
> shirts ran for their cars, whereas the colored cats unfurled their
> push-button London umbrellas and ran for the streetcar, not being able
> both to meet the dress code and to afford a short (pronounced "shout"
> in the hip, hyper-BE used for talking slang). It was definitely better
> to look good than to feel good.
>
> When I lived in Los Angeles, I shopped at the local Brooks Bros. shop,
> located in a loft downtown. It couldn't have been cooler. You merely
> told them to bill you and they did, without requiring that you show a
> single piece of ID, merely accepting whatever name and address that
> you gave them. (At this time, credit cards had not yet been invented
> and Brooks Bros. was above requiring the Charge-A-Plate.) That is,
> they showed blacks the same respect that they showed whites.
> Die-Know-MITE! You couldn't beat that with a sludge hammer! In
> addition, there were no tags or labels on Brooks Bros. clothing to
> indicate where it came from. If you couldn't recognize it simply by
> the material and the fit, well, that was just your lame, unhip ass.
> Like, how fine is that? I bought my shoes at Johnston & Murphy, the
> company that has supplied footwear and leather goods to every
> President since Lincoln, where the manager was my personal clerk. The
> more exclusive the store, the more respect it showed black people,
> making it worth every extra dollar. It was the kind of thing that once
> moved Ebony to publish an article entitled, "Is Los Angeles Heaven?"
> My stepfather commented about Los Angeles that he had had no idea that
> black people were allowed to live so well in the United States.
>
> Unfortunately, this aspect of L.A. never makes the news.
>
> But that was L.A. Boston is more like Saint Louis in the 'Forties.
> But, even in Saint Louis, clerks at the btter stores began to address
> me as "sir" from the time that I was eleven years old. If you don't
> want trouble, you'd best know where you are and what you're doing. The
> great basketball player for the Boston Celtics, Bill Russell (a native
> of Texas, BTW), once commented that he'd rather be in jail in
> Sacramento than sheriff in Boston. Things must be or have been
> something like that in NYC, if Brooks Bros. was the epitome of lame.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On 2/3/08, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Mark beat me to the punch here. I agree that whatever Horne had in mind,
> "Brooks Brothers" was the essence of sartorial squareness in the late '50s.
> ISTR _Mad_ alluding to that fact - and Brooks Bros. metonymical connection
> with hypersquare "Madison Avenue" more than once.
>

> > Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> > I don't think that's approbative. Brooks Brothers was the very emblem
> and
> > summit of straight (= unhip) / corporate / office style. Look at the
> song
> > "I'll Know" from Guys and Dolls [opened November 24, 1950 -- Wikipedia].
> > True, that was 1940s gamblers, per Damon Runyon and Frank Loesser, not
> 1960s
> > jazz, but that Horne cite can't be taken as approbative without further
> > evidence.
>
>
-- 
Mark Mandel
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