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By Root 875 0

pages the New York Rangers had beaten the Chicago Blackhawks 2 to 1, and Vic Hadfield had scored both goals. Our tall Texan vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was quite a character, too. He’d flipped out and got angry at the U.S. Secret Service — told them to stop fencing him in, stop shadowing him, following him around. Johnson grabs guys by the lapels and squeezes the back of their heads to make a point. He reminded me of Tex Ritter — seemed simple and down to earth. Later, when he became president, he used the phrase “We shall overcome” in a speech to the American people. “We Shall Overcome” was the spiritual marching anthem of the civil rights movement. It had been the rallying cry for the oppressed for many years. Johnson interpreted the idea to suit himself, rather than eradicate it. He was not as homespun as it seemed. The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted — in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries — you can be an intellectual genius. If you’re old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self. The art world was changing, too, being turned on its head. Abstract painting and atonal music were hitting the scene, mangling recognizable reality. Goya himself would have been lost at sea if he tried to sail the new wave of art. Len and I would look at all this stuff for what it was worth, and not one cent more.

One guy who kept reappearing in the news was Caryl Chessman, a notorious rapist whom they called the Red-Light Bandit. He was on death row in California after being tried and convicted of raping young women. He had a creative way of doing it — strapped a flashing red light to the top of his automobile and then pulled the girls over to the side of the road, ordering them out, hauling them into the woods, robbing and raping them. He’d been on death row for quite a while making appeal after appeal, but his last appeal had been final and he was scheduled to go into the gas chamber. Chessman had become a cause célèbre and luminaries had taken up his plight. Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost, even Eleanor Roosevelt were calling for his life to be spared. An anti–death penalty group had asked Len to write a song about Chessman.

“How do you write a song about a pariah who rapes young women, what would be the angle?” he asked me as if his imagination was actually on fire.

“I don’t know, Len, I guess you’d have to build it slowly…maybe start with the red lights.”

Len never did write the song, but I think someone else did. One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless. He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way. He was powerfully built, like a linebacker, could kick your silly ass from here to Chinatown, could probably break anybody’s nose. He had studied economics and science, and had it down. Len was brilliant and full of goodwill, one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.

Besides being a songwriter, he was also a daredevil. One freezing winter’s night I sat behind him on his Vespa motor scooter riding full throttle across the Brooklyn Bridge and my heart just about shot up in my mouth. The bike was speeding on the crisscrossed grid in high winds, and I felt like I could have gone overboard at any time — weaving in and out of the night’s traffic, it scared the lights out of me — sliding all over on the iced-up steel. I was on edge the whole way, but I could feel that Chandler was in control, his eyes unblinking and centered steadfast. No doubt about it, heaven was on his side. I’ve only felt like that about a few people.

When I wasn’t staying at Van Ronk’s, I’d usually stay at Ray’s place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I