Broadway is Dark Tonight

 

​I apparently met the civil rights activist and music producer John Hammond, who discovered Leonard Cohen, in a bar in North Adams, Massachusetts. This may be because he was a Vanderbilt and was raised during the summers in Lenox, Massachusetts.

​Lona Cohen was born and raised in Adams, Massachusetts, and her husband, Morris Cohen, worked for Amtorg, which apparently helped smuggle the A-bomb secrets to Soviet Russia.

​Amtorg sold all of Soviet Russia's exports to the outside world through Chase Bank, which was owned and controlled by the Rockefellers. Dr. Ernest Lawrence credited the Rockefellers with the creation of the atomic bomb and with promoting nuclear proliferation.

​The Cohens were Venona spies, which I found out by looking up Suze Rotolo. Suze was Dylan's (also discovered by John Hammond) famous girlfriend from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover, "It Ain't Me Babe," etc. Suze's mom's former boyfriend had been a Venona spy.

​The Rockefellers funded the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University where the MK Ultra experiments took place.

​Both Morris Cohen and Leonard Cohen attended the Rockefeller-built and funded Columbia University in New York City where the uranium atom was first split and the A-bomb was conceived.

​Samuel Cohen lived in Brooklyn, worked on the Manhattan Project, and invented the neutron bomb in 1958.

​Jack Kerouac had a football scholarship to Columbia (where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs) when the Columbia football team had been conscripted to carry the uranium ore to the university's labs.

​I apparently wrote the lyrics to the Goo Goo Dolls' "Broadway" one night in 1986 at the Mohawk Bar in North Adams after the announcer on WMNB said that Ella Fitzgerald had died and that "Broadway is dark tonight." A guy at the bar asked to read what I was writing in my notebook, and I told him I heard on the radio that Ella Fitzgerald had died. He looked ashen and told me he used to manage her.

​Wiki says Ella Fitzgerald only had two managers but that John Hammond discovered her and that she had open-heart surgery in 1986.

​I had lost all the notebooks in which I had written lyrics and ideas, in places they couldn't have possibly gone missing without being taken. Later, I discovered a number of the ideas in the notebooks came to fruition and many of the lyrics apparently became popular songs.

The blog I took this from had earlier been hacked and the entire blog post I had posted before was disapeared.

​The blog post was stolen for perhaps the same reason.

​Also, I wrote a whole page of ideas for rock & roll band names.

​I didn't think any of the names were really good, but later I figured about seven or more of the names were also used by popular recording acts as band names, including the Smashing Pumpkins, which D'arcy Wretzky said she hated and Billy Corgan said emphasized the "smashing" as an adjective.

​For me, I thought it would be a good name for a punk band because where I'm from, we had "Cabbage Stalk Night" on the evening before Halloween, and all the hoodlum kids would go out and smash pumpkins and toilet paper houses.

​I once won a giant pumpkin that the Nickleins or the Sweets grew on Hopper Road, at the Grange Fair, in an auction.

​I had just barely outbid our tenth-grade biology teacher, Ms. Patterson, and she tried to make me promise not to smash it.

​I usually don't make promises because I know something will try to make me break them.

​I don't recall if I agreed to the promise or not, or if this was one of the instances where I learned not to promise anything.

​We kept the pumpkin on the Beverly's porch, and when it began getting old, we smashed it, possibly on Cabbage Stalk Night.

​It was Ms. (Jan) Aronson, our BCC creative writing teacher, who got our class and me to start writing journals in the first place. In the 1990s, her son-in-law (she was "single but seeing someone" when we had the class just before she married Mr. Bronfman) sold Seagram's and bought Vivendi, perhaps because he (Edgar Jr.) had been writing song lyrics since 1973. He then took charge of Warner Music Group in 2004.

​I had apparently committed a formerly embarrassing crime against Ms. Aronson my senior year in high school, and the court-appointed psychologist was the professor who performed the experiment done by the Williams College Psychology Department (based in the Bronfman Science Center) on us. I had mentioned that crime in the post.

​The post had also mentioned that Warren Cable became part of General Cable, and that General Cable, Carol Cable, and Sprague Electric all, unbeknownst to most of us, were owned by Penn Central, which was created by the Vanderbilt family, who probably still own it.

​For me, "the one small point everyone's been missing 'round here" in the Goo Goo Dolls' song was that Sprague's was closing and the city was about to die (it was saved by the Williams College Art Department and Mass MoCA).

​I was very angry when I wrote the words, because our home had just been condemned by the building inspector who allegedly was from North Adams but whom I later came to find out was probably the French Canadian Paul LePage, who eventually became the governor of Maine, and whose 1991 obituary as "Dick Malivaise" said he lived in Berlin, New York, which is on the western border of Williamstown.

​The Boston Phoenix did a two-part article on LePage before it went out of business, stating that LePage had worked "as a government building executive in Massachusetts in the 1980s."

​Most of you don't know that Acadians and maybe French Canadians still hate what they call "Brits" for "le Grande Dérangement."

​Her (Ms. Aronson's) son-in-law might have sold Seagram's because Keith Raniere's mom died of alcoholism and Raniere apparently enslaved the younger Bronfman's two sisters at Nxivm.

​That was the post the hacker had taken down.

​"What a long, strange trip it has been."

• ​Jan Aronson is a successful artist, illustrator, and author living in Ernest Hemingway's Ketchum, Idaho.

​In the page that was stolen, I mentioned that John Hammond was the cousin of the former Williams College minister who had been the inspiration for the Reverend Scott Sloan character in Doonesbury. William Sloane Coffin, in real life, had transferred from Williams to Yale University to be the minister there, where he had received his divinity degree.

​The cousin became a close friend of George H. W. Bush, who got the cousin into the Skull and Bones secret society. Later, the cousin would become a CIA case officer before becoming a peace activist.

​I also showed links that said John Hinckley Jr. and George Scherff Jr. (whom Otto Skorzeny allegedly claimed was Vice President George H. W. Bush at the time of the assassination attempt) were Nazis when former President Reagan was almost assassinated. Hinckley's brother, who was the vice president of Vanderbilt Oil Company (named for the university which had been Hinckley Senior's alma mater), was about to have dinner with Vice President George H. W. Bush's son, Neil, the night after President Reagan was shot.

​Henry was Kris's lab partner in the first chemistry semester, and Henry, who was also from Stockbridge, had dropped out of Harvard after his roommate committed suicide.

​When students commit suicide at Harvard, their roommates are given perfect 4.0 GPAs for that semester.

​Henry was an English major and gave Dave and me a copy of the book The Hundredth Monkey, which is how I learned of the theory the book promotes: that once a certain number of a species learn a new idea or technique that is successful, it somehow spreads throughout the species even when other members aren't in contact.

​The Hundredth Monkey was also a treatise against nuclear proliferation.

​I once asked Henry what iambic pentameter was, and he rattled off the cadence off the top of his head.

​Henry, I, and our environmental science teacher Charlie Weinstein were playing pickup basketball in the BCC gym one afternoon when Henry accidentally broke my nose.

​I believe I also wrote the words to U2's "The Sweetest Thing" when I still had two black eyes from that accident. (I have brown eyes, and the girl I was thinking about when I wrote them had blue eyes. Bono has blue eyes, and his wife Ali has brown eyes).

​I was really into eye color at the time and began studying eyes. The girl I stalked/obsessed over at that time had amazing eyes. I didn't know that when I decided to become infatuated with her. She would stare right at you as you talked to her with her pupils dilated. Then, we learned in ecology that the alleles for eyes cause people to have blue eyes one-quarter as often as people with brown eyes. Because of that, blue eyes would one day disappear from the human race, even though we are all born with blue eyes.

​I began learning about rod and cone cells and that our eyes were made to see best and felt most comfortable in a boreal forest and that people's eyes dilate when they feel love (or are high on drugs).

​The girl's eyes were always dilated, no matter who she was talking to.

​Perhaps coincidentally, I just drew this to post in the "learn to become an artist" Facebook group.

​There was a drawing, which was a poster for safe sex in the activities office where I did work-study, where I recall writing a number of the lyrics when I was supposed to be doing work-study. It was of a young man with blond hair and brown eyes riding a bicycle built for two with a cute girl riding on the seat in front with light brown hair and blue eyes. The young man was grinning lasciviously and staring naughtily at the girl's butt, while the girl looked innocently but with a whimsical, kind of concerned expression back over her shoulder. I remember thinking about that drawing when I believe I wrote those lyrics.

​

Back to Songs