Editor’s Note: I first met Tim Rakel, the author of this essay, about 20 years ago when we were distributing bread from a rickety panel van for a worker-owned Saint Louis bakery called Black Bear. From that very first meeting, I remember his bright eyes, his intelligence, his Amish-like beard and outfit, and his insistence on buying a copy of my recently published novel despite me telling him that paying for it was unnecessary. That interaction now strikes me as a hallmark of his orientation to the worker and the work: Fair work must be met with fair pay. Among many other occupations and preoccupations – library worker, musician, barkeep, etc. – he focuses strongly on making and playing his own music with his bands and showcasing other music through his long-running radio show, Mystery Train, on KDHX, 88.1 FM Saint Louis.

By Tim Rakel

I moved away from the city of Saint Louis about six years ago, landing in the much quieter, somewhat more easily-paced town of Hermann, Missouri, where we have a yard full of chickens and vegetable gardens. While some things are different – the more idyllic and bucolic surroundings, for example – there is still evidence of dissatisfied reactions and poor decisions: Fast food trash and cigarettes thrown about, angry driving, and other negative phenomena that arrive in smaller quantities but nevertheless are present.

There seems to be a tangible anger wherever you go, a sense of fear perhaps but definitely the unanswered frustrations of people trying to change something or to simply survive while struggling to find the means. These unfortunate situations seem to end in finding something or someone to blame. My own lens sees these circumstances in purely economic terms: class differences rather than anything to do with race or nationality.

Whatever advantages I’ve gained from knowing the terrain of both city and country is qualified by the disadvantage of not really belonging to either place.

I lived in Saint Louis for nearly 35 years, and so it has inevitably crept into my songwriting. The May Day Orchestra, with which I play most often, has focused on farther-away places, from Chicago to Congo, and most recently Mombasa, Kenya. Nonetheless, Saint Louis still emerges in the band’s creations. In writing about May Day and the anarchists of the labor movement, it is important to note that Saint Louis was shut down by a general strike in 1877, a decade before the more widely-known events in Chicago. It is the closest a North American city has ever come to being, however briefly, a collective worker’s state. In writing about Ota Benga, a pygmy man from colonial-era Congo, I was first drawn to the part of his story where he ends up in Saint Louis as part of a human exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair.

Consider all the things that have taken place historically in the places we regularly inhabit. Most days go by without a thought to that past. Here in Hermann, the Civil War played out in daily lives, and just before that, German immigrants came with hopes of establishing a utopian way of life. Presently, wherever you may be, it seems there is the usual flood of rhetoric, be it patriotic or racist or something else, seemingly designed to distract us from realizing the great class division between the common people in any given place and those whose wealth has corrupted and subsumed so many facets of life. This is a fundamental viewpoint that informs much of my musical work.

Another one of my musical projects, The Union Electric, is a band that has dealt more with the city of Saint Louis itself over the years, but as with The May Day Orchestra, the idea of preserving links to the past is essential in the hope that history and its potential lessons will not be forgotten.

Below are the lyrics I wrote to four songs of The Union Electric. They are accompanied by my thoughts. Two of the songs have been recorded and are available on vinyl and at www.theunionelectric.bandcamp.com. The other two songs have been performed live but have not yet been officially released.

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Henry Boernstein became a subject of fascination for me over the years as I lived in and learned about Saint Louis. His book, Memoirs of a Nobody, recounts much of his life. Some highlights include his participation in the German immigrant units of the Union Army and their decisive fight to win control of the arsenal in Saint Louis. Anti-slavery German recruits to the Union also fought in Hermann, where socialist and anti-religious groups were commonplace. (Not so much anymore.)

 Mysteries of Saint Louis, Part One (for Henry Boernstein) 

Boernstein is a ghost calling from the past
 Of blue and gray uniforms
 Arsenals lost and won
 Unions formed and broken
   
 Boernstein is a ghost calling from the past
 a memory put on a shelf, shut in a cabinet
 and locked in the library at night
   
 Boernstein is a name misspelled on a grave
 the sun rises over Bloody Island
 stormy nights along the river, nobody on the banks
 looking to the Illinois side
   
 Boernstein is a ghost calling from the past
 sees the people eating fast, sees the people working slow
 sees everything looking like it's all upside down
 Boernstein is a ghost calling from the past 

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Joel Wingate Folk was born in Tennessee and came to Saint Louis as a young lawyer. He was in the city in 1900 when Saint Louis Streetcar workers went on strike. Folk was among a group to negotiate a settlement between the company and the union. Unfortunately, the company did not uphold its end of the deal. This corruption and events like it inspired the idealistic Folk (now calling himself Joseph “Joe” W. Folk) to run for circuit attorney against a cast of others who also had anti-corruption platforms. When elected, he refused to appoint assistants who expected positions. He soon indicted election officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties for neglect. The case that made him famous came later when he acted on James Galvin’s newspaper stories, which exposed unsavory links between business and politics. Folk called a Grand Jury, which found that pay-to-play bribes were involved in the bidding of railway contracts. The case exposed the roles of many prominent members of the community, but many were later acquitted by higher courts. Folk’s single term in office cost him his future political ambitions, as people of influence were now scared to allow him the power to act according to his strong ideals. Such are the people for whom ballads should be written. . . .

You Have Been Served (for Joseph Folk)

no one on the farm, they’ve all gone to town
no one in the factory, the factory closed down
if you want a job, it’s the service industry
all kinds of service with looting on the side
just another day in this shameful town
we stand around and watch the whole rotten deal go down
they meet in South Saint Louis to pool their wealth
enough to fix all the elections

a new standard of an honest man
is one that stays bought once you pay him

corruption to the breaking point
Red Galvin take the lid off, look at this mess inside
the circuit attorney is hired to fight the criminals
the easiest ones to find float right up to the top

a man named Folk stands alone, stand down they say
let the status quo continue, let things go their way
selling out the people, that’s bribery
the oldest tradition in our democracy

lick up and spit down, lick up and spit down
now you have been served, you have been served
set the bribe-givers against the bribe-takers
take the whole thing down because bribery is treason

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Living in the Gravois Park neighborhood of Saint Louis for more than a decade and near South Grand and in Fox Park before that, the sounds of gunfire, emergency sirens, buses and a general din gradually wore on me. Nothing disturbed me quite as much as the helicopters. As a musician, I’m not opposed to sound but as a self-righteous American citizen, I like to be the one choosing or controlling it.

The Eternal Police Helicopter 

 there’s a fear of silence
 fear of silence rattles the streets
 fear of silence rattles the street
 and it shakes the houses
 and I’ve lost all my focus
   
 were those fireworks or gunshots?
 fear of silence rattles the streets
 and the eternal police helicopter
 up in the sky
 (wish you could hear) 

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The Mysteries of Saint Louis was the novel Henry Boernstein published serially in a German-language, Saint Louis newspaper in 1851. He was an Austrian and immigrant to the city, as many have been in Saint Louis. The text is rich with images of the city that was. Some places have been renamed and 150 years have passed but many are familiar enough. Lines from the book crept into the lyrics for another Boernstein-inspired lyric written while I was packing up to move from Saint Louis to Hermann.

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 Mysteries of Saint Louis, Part Two

 gas lamps flickering, the silence reigned
 save the howling of dogs in the yards
 and out on the river a steamboat ascending
 emigrants on the deck, brawlers in the bars
 sober and honest not a one, crowded with gamblers and cheats
 torrents of rain down on these dark and dismal streets
   
 lynching Lovejoy and staining Alton’s shore 
 heard the tale down at the Piasa bar 
   
 muttered to himself unconnected sentences mingled with curses
 howling unintelligibly with wind over the plains
 like the dim sound of two o’clock from the bells
 the city streets and the cathedral bells
 they told us their whole story, they were bid keep quiet
 the signal blows of the watchman, drought or flood at the sawmill
   
 off the garbage road and out to the brewery 
 away from these diggings of old
 the Meramec runs and beyond the Missouri 
 if we should go so far, if we should go so far
  
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 Post-Script (Mysteries of Saint Louis, Part Three) 

 “As long as we have Saint Louis, the rest of Missouri can go to hell,” 
 I think Abraham Lincoln said that. 

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Tim Rakel is a DJ on radio station KDHX 88.1 FM in Saint Louis, where he hosts the weekly show Mystery Train. He works various day-jobs and occasionally plays shows with bands such as The Union Electric and The May Day Orchestra. The latter group has recently released their third record, Wake, on Rankoutsider Records. Although he no longer lives in Saint Louis, he maintains a mailing address at P.O. Box 63098, Saint Louis, MO 63163. Recordings of his music are at www.theunionelectric.bandcamp.com

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