Maverick Philosopher

It's Only Rock and Roll

Christopher Caldwell reviews Jann S. Wenner, Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir at Claremont Review of Books.

Theme music.

The Everly Brothers

Tunes and commentary by Scott Johnson. With a tip o' the hat to Bro Inky.

Dylan's Philosophy of Modern Song

From Variety:

Of the dozens or even hundreds of singers and songwriters that Bob Dylan extols in his new  book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” there is one that seems to stand out even more than the others, so effusive is Dylan’s praise. This performer, he writes, is “downright incredible” and “lived in every moment of every song he sang… His performance is just downright incredible. There is nothing small you can say about it… When he stood and sang, he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word. What more could you want from an artist?”

The artist in question: Perry Como, naturally.

As a Dylan fan from the early '60s, I can tell you that one can never be sure when Bob is serious and when he is putting us on.

Will I buy this book?  Is the sky blue? I was about to write, "Is the Pope Catholic?" But that doesn't work anymore, with Bergoglio the Benighted at the helm of a sinking ship. 

Addendum (1/24)

'Termitic' and 'benighted' are adjectives I have repeatedly applied to 'Pope' Francis. No doubt some of you find that offensive. I intend no disrespect for the office, but I do have serious moral and intellectual reservations about its current occupant. And you should too. See this Telegraph piece which begins:

Gay “clubs” operate openly in Catholic seminaries, the institutions that prepare men for the priesthood, the late Pope Benedict XVI has claimed in a posthumously published book scathing of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda. 

In a blistering attack on the state of the Catholic Church under his successor’s papacy, Benedict, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, said that the vocational training of the next generation of priests is on the verge of “collapse”.

He claimed that some bishops allow trainee priests to watch pornographic films as an outlet for their sexual urges.

Benedict gave instructions that the book, What Christianity Is, should be published after his death.

A Sentimental Old Song . . .

. . . and a couple of guitar slingers 'of note,' one no longer among us.  Of time and the river.

Christmas Eve at the Oldies

Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

The following selections and commentary courtesy of Edward Buckner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LndB94i2F_0

“Dieux Parmi Nous” (God among us) by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. The glorious final movement from Messiaen's nine-part La Nativité is performed by Richard Gowers on the organ of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. It is a tradition in England for the family to listen to the carols from King’s on Christmas Eve, and for the women to talk over it. [Ed's remark cannot be sexist if it is true.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YamipW44v4c

“Toccata on 'Veni Emmanuel'” by the English composer Andrew Carter. The origin of the melody was a mystery for some time but it was recently found in a 15th-century manuscript in the National Library of France. Keep an eye out for the organist’s socks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SixnHKwyrjI

“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree" by English composer Elizabeth Poston. During World War II Poston is supposed to have worked as a secret agent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq8mgyBUJgk

“Nativity Carol” by English composer John Rutter. Rutter is hated by many as verging on kitsch, but “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without this magnificent carol”. Judge for yourself.  [A little kitsch never hurt anybody.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXOaTOylx0c

“This Christmas Night” by Australian composer Malcolm Williamson. Williamson worked as a nightclub pianist when he moved to London, but soon converted to Roman Catholicism. He became the Master of the Queen's Music in 1975.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XQwLp9d5eg

“A Babe is Born” by Welsh composer William Mathias. His anthem “Let the people praise Thee, O God” was written for the July 1981 royal wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and thus heard by 1 billion people. The tenor part is difficult for us tenors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wHyMR_SCA

“O Come, All Ye Faithful” (Adeste Fideles) from our wonderful Westminster Abbey. The origin of the melody is unknown, but was first published by John Francis Wade in his collection Cantus Diversi. Watch out for the lovely descant at ‘Sing choirs of angels’.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tunes from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973)

Ronettes,  Be My Baby (opening sequence).

Rolling Stones, Tell Me (Keitel's entrance).

Rolling Stones, Jumpin' Jack Flash (De Niro's entrance).

Smokey Robinson, Mickey's Monkey

Derek and the Dominoes, I Looked Away

Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman

Little Caesar and the Romans, Those Oldies but Goodies

Johnny Ace, Pledging My Love

Paragons, Florence 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Merton, Baez, Dylan, and Ry Cooder

Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist -- all of it.  The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966:

Borrowed  a record player and  played Joan Baez over again -- and now really know "Silver Dagger" (before I had the melody confused with "East Virginia"). One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan's Highway 61 [Revisited].  

On p. 324, Merton references Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. YouTuber comment:

One of the greatest songs ever written. I just love it. It describes so accurately the feelings we had back in the 60s. Everything was strange and new and brilliant. Music was everywhere, all with different sounds and lyrics. Dylan was right in the middle of it. There are so many good songs on his albums. If you aren't familiar with him you should listen to some of his stuff.

In the same volume of Merton's journal we find "A Midsummer Diary for M" and on p. 305:

All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez's song, "Silver Dagger." I can't get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself -- and yourself for me, in a way.

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. The old 1960 Jim Reeves country crossover hit.

Ry Cooder, Good Night Irene.  Leadbelly.  Eric Clapton's rendition at a 1982 English Christmas party. 

Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses. The old Hank Snow tune.

Ry Cooder, Maria Elena. An old standard from circa 1932.

Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas. Excellent evocative video.  Great YouTuber comment:

Man I have been gone way too long. I miss America, the open road, the wild west. I remember staying in hotels with just a dozen rooms or so, and only maybe four of them in operation. Twenty seven bucks and bed springs so squeaky we had to make love on the floor. Walking out to the pay phone, a billion stars in the sky, I need to try and find my way back again.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.   YouTuber comment: "Late 1959. I was in 4th grade, listening to KFWB Los Angeles."  Same here. Same year, same grade, same station, KFWB, Channel 98! Color Radio! My favorite deejay was B. Mitchel Reed.  I learned 'semolian' and 'mishigas' from him. His real surname is 'Goldberg,' which means mountain of gold. I will say no more lest I provoke my alt-Right correspondents.  

Timi Yuro, Hurt. When I first heard this I was sure she was black. I was wrong. She's Italian, and her real name is Rosemarie Timotea Auro. What pipes!

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Roy Orbison, In Dreams

Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon 

Ketty Lester, Love Letters 

Etta James, At Last  

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Sentimental you say? What would life be without sentiment? You say it's overdone? You suffer from an excess of cool. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, and feel. Tonight we feel, tomorrow we think.  About sentimentality and everything else under the sun.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock and Roll Apologetics

A curious sub-genre of meta-rock devoted to the defense of the devil's music.

The Showmen, It Will Stand, 1961 

Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll

But does it really "soothe the soul"? Is it supposed to?  For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.

Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock and Roll (but I Like It)

Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over, Beethoven.  Amazingly good.  Roll over, Chuck Berry!

Danny and the Juniors, Rock and Roll is Here to Stay

Chuck Berry and Friends, Rock and Roll Music

Off-topic bonus cut:  The Chantels, Look in My Eyes, 1961.  YouTuber comment: "Emanating from the Heart Chakra. Something pop songs rarely do anymore. Feel it?" The popular music of this period had human meaning, coming from the heart and speaking to the heart, even when it passed over into schmaltz and sentimentality.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cool Tunes and More Mose

Ramsey Lewis Trio, The In Crowd

Dave Brubeck, Take Five

Corsairs, Smoky Places

Harry Nilsson, Everybody's Talkin'

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out 

Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise

Thelonius Monk, In Walked Bud

Mose Allison, Your Mind's on Vacation

Mose Allison, I Don't Worry About a Thing

Mose Allison, Don't Get Around Much Anymore

Too cool for you? Try this.

Mose Allison, The Song is Ended

Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz

The 15th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of

Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker

Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac, San Francisco

Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.

This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our band Dudley Nightshade, who introduced me to Mose Allison in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it, more or less, in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73.  Heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Mass. with a girlfriend  I dubbed 'Springtime Mary'  which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.

Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues

Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues

Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk

Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man

Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour

Episode Thirty Two: Moon.  The harvest moon is big and bright these October nights.  

Informed commentary by a lover of and major contributor to musical Americana. Hear how much you've missed and how much young Bobby Zimmerman sopped up through long and cold Hibbing nights listening to the radio.

Around 50:00 Dylan commences reading  the Slim Gaillard passage from Kerouac's On the Road and then cues up a Gaillard number.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marital Advice

Before you even think of getting married, make sure you have plenty of money.

Then shop around.

Consider who will become your mother-in-law.

If you want to be happy,  don't worry too much about physical beauty. 

If she has a cheatin' heart, hit the road, Jack.

But then again you might be better off without a wife.

.............................

Bonus cut: Lauro Nyro, Wedding Bell Blues

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September's on the wane.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

And while we have Miss King cued up, lend an ear to One Fine Day.

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. And so we still think. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Billie Holliday, September Song

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.'  I wonder why.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Wall of Sound

No dark songs this Saturday Night. Some upbeat numbers to take our minds off the depredatory Left and their depredations. Here are some of my favorite Phil Spector productions.  It wouldn't have been the 'sixties without him. I avert my eyes from his later misadventures and remember him for his contributions to the Boomer soundtrack, than which, no doubt, no greater can be conceived.

Crystals, Uptown, 1962.

Crystals, He's a Rebel

Ronettes, Be My Baby

Crystals, Da Doo Ron Ron

Curtis Lee, Pretty Little Angel Eyes.

Great dance video. Curtis Edwin Lee, one-hit wonder, hailed from Yuma, Arizona.  He died at 75 years of age on 8 January 2015.  Obituary here. His signature number became a hit in 1961, reaching the #7 slot on the Billboard Hot 100. When I discovered that the record was produced by the legendary Phil Spector, I understood why it is so good.  After the limelight, Lee returned to Yuma for a normal life. This tune goes out to wifey, with love.  When I first espied those angel eyes back in '82, I had the thought, "Here she is, man, the one for you. Go for it!" And I did, and its been very good indeed. Forty years and counting.

Ben E. King, Spanish Harlem, 1960.

Crystals, Then He Kissed Me

Beach Boys, Then I Kissed Her. With a tribute to Marilyn M.

Paris Sisters, I Love How You Love Me, 1961.

Ronettes, Walkin' in the Rain

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dark Songs for Dark Times

Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Moon Rising

The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again

Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

Bob Dylan, Masters of War

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet. But it's getting there . . .

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ten Violent Democrat-Run Cities

New York, New York. "Start spreading the news . . ."

L. A. Woman

Born in Chicago

Houston

Streets of Philadelphia

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. "The post office has been stolen and the mail box is locked." Prescient!

Detroit City

Dallas Alice

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Lady Came from Baltimore

Like crime? Vote Democratic!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'The King' Dead 45 Years

Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 45 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

It's Now or Never

Surrender

Continuing in the romantic vein:

Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

A Gospel number:

Amazing Grace

From the spiritual to the secular:

Little Sister

Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

Devil in Disguise. "Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

Wooden Heart

Marlene Dietrich, Muss i denn 

You Tuber comment:

I was taught this song, in German, by a lovely young woman. I was 21 years old. She was a bit younger in years but older in so many - - - so very many - - - ways. We had just finished a room-service breakfast in a sun-filled hotel room overlooking the Rhine in Koln (Cologne) in 1954. I was impatient to get dressed and leave. The song changed my mind. I never hear this song without thinking of that lovely morning. My tour was over. I left Germany 4 days later. I never saw or heard of her again.

Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

Out of time. Next stop: dinner with Dan Bongino.

Posted by Bill Vallicella on Saturday, August 19, 2017 at 05:56 PM 

Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 45 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

It's Now or Never

Surrender

Continuing in the romantic vein:

Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

A Gospel number:

Amazing Grace

From the spiritual to the secular:

Little Sister

Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

Devil in Disguise. "Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

Wooden Heart

Marlene Dietrich, Muss i denn 

You Tuber comment:

I was taught this song, in German, by a lovely young woman. I was 21 years old. She was a bit younger in years but older in so many - - - so very many - - - ways. We had just finished a room-service breakfast in a sun-filled hotel room overlooking the Rhine in Koln (Cologne) in 1954. I was impatient to get dressed and leave. The song changed my mind. I never hear this song without thinking of that lovely morning. My tour was over. I left Germany 4 days later. I never saw or heard of her again.

Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

Out of time. Next stop: dinner with Dan Bongino.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outstanding Dylan Covers

Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan , Chronicles

Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.

Joan Baez, Hard Rain

Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown

McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages 

Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna

But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent best. Mid-'60s. Blonde on Blonde album.

More later. Time to rustle up some vittles for wifey, pour myself a stiff one and get tuned up for Bongino. Enjoy your Saturday night.

Rocks and Gravel

I forgot how good this is. He played better guitar in the old days, and could do amazing things with his voice.  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Purgation of Memory and the Waters of Oblivion

So many of our memories should be allowed to sink forever beneath the waters of oblivion. But not all. Let's recall some songs about forgetting and water.

Bob Dylan and the Band, Too Much of Nothing

Say Hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Give them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion.

Doors, Soul Kitchen. "Learn to forget, learn to forget."

Bobby Rydell, Forget Him

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Moon River

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. 

Chase Webster, Moody River

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jimmy Elledge and Some Other One-Hit Wonders

Jimmy Elledge, Funny How Time Slips Away.  Born January 8, 1943 in Nashville, Elledge died June 10, 2012 after complications following a stroke.  The song, written by Willie Nelson, made the #22 slot on Billboard Hot 100 in 1961, and sold over one million copies. Elledge never had another hit. As a YouTube commenter points out, that does sound like Floyd Cramer tickling the ivories.  A great song.  I always thought it was a female singing.

Rosie and the Originals, Angel Baby, 1960.  Perfect for cruising Whittier Boulevard in your '57 Chevy on a Saturday night.  This one goes out to Tom Coleman.

Claudine Clark, Party Lights, 1962

Contours, Do You Love Me? 1962

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog,' 1966.   A forgotten oldie if ever there was one.  If you remember this bit of vintage vinyl, one of the strangest songs of the '60s, I'll buy you a beer or a cat named 'dog.' One.

Bruce Channel, Hey! Baby, 1962

Barbara George, I Know, 1962

And now a couple more forgotten one-hit wonders who get almost no play on the oldies stations which is exactly why you need Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies:

Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin'  Trivia question: The song contains references to three contemporary songs.  Name them.  And how quaint the reference to the fellow with the switch-blade knife.

Larry Finnegan, Dear One, 1962 

David Bowie?  Who's he?

UPDATE.   Dave B. tells me that I owe his wife Ronda a beer:

Yeah she remembered that song from the opening riff.

What a waste of a nice Gibson SG...

You are quite right, Dave: the girl is flailing at a Gibson SG standard.  Clapton, a.k.a 'God,' played them before switching over to Fender Strats.  I wanted an SG back around '67 or '68 but they were too much in demand.  So I 'settled' for  a Gibson ES 335 TD.  But then I did the dumbest thing I ever did a few years later.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Obscure '60s Psychedelia

The Monterey Pop Festival was 55 years ago, yesterday. Your humble correspondent was in attendance.

How many of these do you remember?   If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason.  But among the latter are some very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

Not Dark Yet

 Tomorrow, Bob Dylan turns 81.

Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door. The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.

A tip of the hat to Bro Inky for sending me to Powerline where Scott Johnson has a couple of celebratory pieces with plenty of links to Dylan covers. Here's one and here's the other. An excerpt from the first:

In his illuminating City Journal essay on Pete Seeger — “America’s most successful Communist” — Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger took pride of place. Husock’s essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the confines of agitprop, found his voice, and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music. Looking back on his long career, one can discern his respect for the tradition as well as his ambition to take his place at its head.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Heart Failure

There is heart failure of the electrical and hydraulic sort and there is custody-of-the-heart failure. Which is worse? Well, which is better, our spiritual or our physical health?

Johnny Cash: "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine."

Elvis Presley: "I can't help falling in love with you." Andrea Bocelli in Las Vegas

Bea Wain, Heart and Soul, 1939.  

Neil Young, Heart of Gold

Tom Waits, Heart Of Saturday Night

Marcels, Heartache, 1961

Linda Ronstadt, Heart Like a Wheel

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies

Herewith, six definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he uses them to say something. You don't agree? De gustibus non est disputandum!

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, Hear Me Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon the radical, McCartney the romantic, Starr the regular guy.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rydell Remembered

Bobby Rydell has died at age 79.

In the late '50s, early '60s a number of Italian-American singers changed their names to avoid anti-Italian prejudice and to assimilate. Rydell was among them. Assimilation, however, is a thing of the past, and the current lack thereof is a good part of our nation's decline.  But I digress. 

Before Bobby Darin became Bobby Darin he rejoiced under the name, Walden Robert Cassotto.  Dream Lover.  18 Yellow Roses. You're the Reason I'm Living.

Bobby Rydell started out Robert Ridarelli.  Forget Him.  Volare. "Letsa fly . . . ."  We Got Love.

No, his name wasn't Dino Martino, it was Dino Paul Crocetti.  Schmaltzy as it is, That's Amore captures the Nagelian what-it's-like of being in love.  Houston.

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, better known as Connie Francis. My Darling Clementine. Never on Sunday.  

Timoteo Aurro = Timi Yuro.  When I first heard her back in the day, I thought she was black.  What a voice!  What's the Matter, Baby?  Her signature number: Hurt.

Laura traded in 'Nigro' for 'Nyro.'  Wedding Bell Blues.   And When I Die.  These go out to Monterey Tom, big L.N. fan.  Nyro died young in 1997 of ovarian cancer, 49 years of age.

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower!  This video shows what the dude looked like. Resembles a super short Joe Pesci.  What Kind of Love is This?

Your Vehicle

Keep it roadworthy. But it's only a vehicle. And life's only a road.

And don't forget to take it easy. We're going to the end of the line.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sartorial Songs

In Chapter 42 of his Essays, Montaigne remarks that

We praise a horse for its strength and speed, not on account of its harness; a greyhound for its swiftness and not its collar; a hawk for its wing and not for its jesses and bells. Why then do we not value a man for what is his? . . . If you bargain over a horse, you remove its trappings, you see it bare and uncovered . . . . Why, when estimating a man, do you estimate him all wrapped and muffled up? . . . We must judge him by himself, not by his attire. (Tr. E. J. Trechmann)

I am tempted to agree by saying what I once said to my mother when she told me that clothes make the man, namely, that if clothes make the man, then the kind of man that clothes make is not the kind of man I want to be. (Women are undeniably more sensitive than men to the fact that the world runs on appearances. They have a deep intuitive understanding of the truth that the Germans express when they say, Der Schein regiert die Welt.)

But there is another side to the problem, one that the excellent Montaigne ignores. A horse does not choose its bit and harness, but has them imposed on it. A man, however, chooses how he will appear to his fellows, and so choosing makes a statement as to his values and disvalues. It follows that there is some justification in judging by externals. For the externals we choose, unlike the externals imposed on a horse, are defeasible indicators of what is internal. In the case of human beings, the external is not merely external: the external is also an expression of the internal. Our outer trappings express our attitudes and beliefs, our allegiances and alignments.

But enough philosophy!  Punch the clock. Tomorrow's another day. On to some tunes.  Pour yourself a stiff one. We get things off to a rousing start this fine Saturday evening with

ZZ Top, Sharp-Dressed Man.  This one goes out to Mike Valle who is definitely strutting his sartorial stuff these days.

Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton, Bell Bottom Blues.  Sticking with the 'blue' theme:

Bobby Vinton, Blue Velvet.  Check out the Lana Del Rey version.  And of course, this from the moody & mesmerizing David Lynch flick.

Carl Perkins, Blue Suede Shoes.  The Perry Como Show (sic!), 1956.

Mitch Ryder, Devil with the Blue Dress On

Jimmy Clanton, Venus in Blue Jeans, 1962

Bob Dylan, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

Bob Dylan, Boots of Spanish Leather

Del Shannon, Hats Off to Larry

Bobby Bare, Long Black Veil

Jane Russell, Buttons and Bows

Johnny Cash, Man in Black

Big Bopper, Chantilly Lace, 1958

But:

Can you judge a man by the way he wears his hair?
Can you read his mind, by the clothes that he wears?
Can you see a bad man by the pattern on his tie?
Then Mr. You're a Better Man Than I!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940's Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

St. Valentine's Day at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

First off, a big 10-4 to the Canadian truckers and their American confreres. The purpose of government is to serve the governed, not oppress them and violate their rights. Political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed. Pseudo-cons such as George F. Will and his ilk yap and scribble about this concept, but that is as far as it goes for them. The truckers have taken action and put their careers on the line in defense of the rights that the totalitarians are bent on violating.

Eddy Rabbit, Drivin' My Life Away

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Buck Owens, Truck Drivin' Man

Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' cover. 

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Truck Drivin' Man

Bob Dylan, Rollin' and Tumblin'

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia and Americana

I post what I like and I like what I post.

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Doors, Crystal Ship

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame

Elvis Presley, Spanish Eyes

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry, Cutting Edge take. 

Albert King, Crosscut Saw

Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World

YouTuber comment: "There is enough great music to listen to for a thousand years without ever having to listen to mindless shite if only people would explore the past." That's no shite, son.

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom.  One of Dylan's greatest anthems.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

An equally powerful version by Janis Joplin

Mike Bloomfield, Carmelita Skiffle

A bar or two is all it takes recognize the signature sound of Michael Bloomfield, Jew, who exemplifies cultural appropriation at its best. My second guitar hero. My first was Dick Dale who, though not a Jew, gave us a version of Misirlou.

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Billy Joel, Piano Man

Don MacLean, American Pie

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Americana

Tim Hardin, Lady Came from Baltimore

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song. Dylan's 1963 original

Byrds, Pretty Boy Floyd

Marty Robbins, El Paso

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache

Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin'

Charley Ryan, Hot Rod Lincoln, the original.  Before Johnny Bond, before Commander Cody. 

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' cover. YouTuber comment:

I don't know what it is about this particular Tom Waits song. Out of all the music I've heard, this is the only one that tears me up from the first chord. I'm a big boy, all grown-up. But I'm helpless to stop those tears. I've seen my fair share, and more, of pain and suffering and death, and so should be fairly immune to such sentimentality. Many songs are supposedly more tear-jerking, . . .  but NOT ONE moves me like this. Maybe because I used to hitchhike a lot? Maybe because I've seen, and been involved in, several car accidents? Maybe because a trucker friend was drowned when the ferry he was travelling on sunk? I don't know. I've always appreciated, and liked a lot, Tom Waits' compositions and performances, and yet this one song captures me completely, emotionally. Perhaps I'm turning into a softy. More likely, I'm just getting too old for this life. Answers on a postcard, please... (Tom Foyle)

Yes, one can get too old for this life.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Americana

Buffy Sainte-Marie, I'm Gonna be a Country Girl Again

Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

16 Horsepower, Wayfaring Stranger

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo. Have you heard this version?

Bob Dylan, As I Went Out One Morning

Highwaymen, The City of New Orleans

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo, 1963

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Out with the Old, In with the New

Happy New Year, dear readers. I wish you all the best for the coming year. 

Neil Young, Old Man 

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. Does it really soothe the soul? Or does it stimulate something 'south' of the soul? If the soul has a bodily locus or point of attachment, where would it be? But I am done thinking for the day. Time to feel. Balance in all things, including balance.

The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Tom T. Hall, Old Five and Dimers Like Me

John Fogerty, The Old Man Down the Road

Ray Charles, Ol' Man River

Bob Dylan, New Morning

Eagles, New Kid in Town

And many more . . . .

Such Sweet Sorrow

Part of what makes "parting such sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is the realization that one may never see the beloved again alive. Death presides over all of life; in leave-taking he steps out of the shadows. You see the glint of his scythe from the corner of the eye.

In the twilight glow, I see her
Blue eyes crying in the rain;
As we kissed goodbye and parted,
I knew we'd never meet again.

Love is like a dying ember,
Only memories remain;
Through the ages I'll remember,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Now my hair has turned to silver,
All my life I've loved in vain;
I can see her star in heaven,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder,
We'll stroll hand in hand again;
And in a land that knows no parting,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Written by Fred Rose and first recorded by Roy Acuff in 1947. Numerous covers.

A little known version by Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Women and Girls

Where would we be without them? Languishing in the sphere of the merely possible. On the other hand, "Pretty girls make graves." (Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums)

Roy Orbison, Pretty Woman. Mercy! See how many of the sidemen you can identify. A great song that blends the the tender & romantic with the thrustingly Dionysian.

Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman. I won't say anything, lest I gush, my romanticism loosened by a delicious blend of tequila and Campari.  The polished Blonde on Blonde version. Van Morrison pays tribute here.

Bob Dylan, Girl from the North Country

Van Morrison, Brown Eyed Girl. This one goes out to Kathy H.

Aretha Franklin, Natural Woman. Written by Carole King. Her version.

Rolling Stone, Honky Tonk Woman

Santana, Black Magic Woman

Eric Clapton, Have You Ever Loved a Woman?

Ray Charles, I Got a Woman, 1954

Peter and Gordon, Woman 

Elvis Presley, Santa Lucia

Andrea Bocelli, Ave Maria (Franz Schubert)

And many more . . . .

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Nonsense Titles and Lyrics

I'm a serious man, as serious as cancer some would say. But it's Saturday night, a night on which I allow myself a drink or two and some nostalgic indulgence.  Tonight, the unseriousness of nonsense titles and lyrics.

The Rivingtons, Papa Oom Mow Mow

The Trashmen, The Bird is the Word. It is not about Bird's Opening. A partial rip-off of the Rivingtons. Cultural appropriation?

Shirley Ellis, The Nitty Gritty Is 'nitty gritty' a racist dog whistle?

Shirley Ellis, The Name Game, long version. You didn't know there was a long version? Another reason you need my blog.

The Crystals, Da Doo Ron Ron 

Captain Beefheart, Abba Zaba. I'd like to see a transcription of these lyrics. California's Mojave desert can do some strange things to your head.

Manfred Mann, Doo Wah Diddy Diddy

Arthur "Blind" Blake, Diddy Wah Diddy, 1929.  Very nice guitar work. "I wish someone would tell me what 'Diddy Wah Diddy' means."

Little Richard, Tutti Frutti

The Chips, Rubber Biscuit, 1956

Beatles, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

Eric Clapton, Hootchie Kootchie Man. This one goes out to Ed Buckner.  Solo starts at 2:45. Cultural appropriation at its finest.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'Babe' and 'Baby' Songs

With half-apologies to overly sensitive feministas. Look, real men love and respect women and they use these words as terms  of endearment. Take a powder!

Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, 1965. Don't let them say your hair's too long!

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, It Ain't Me Babe, 1964. Note how Joan mothers the young Bob. Turtles' 1965 cover. Baez solo version.

Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, 1965. This one goes out to Charaine H.

Beatles, Baby's in Black

Ronettes, Be My Baby, 1963.

Bob Dylan, Baby Let Me Follow You Down, 1962. The surging harmonica near the beginning does it for me every time. 

Traveling Wilburys, She's My Baby, 2007.

Charles Brown, Merry Christmas, Baby

Dion Dimucci with John Hammond, My Baby Loves to Boogie, 2020.

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby, 1964.

Bob Dylan, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, 1968.

Them, Baby Please Don't Go.  Muddy Waters, 1953.

Bruce Channel, Hey Baby! Date? Early '60s.

Ronettes, Baby, I Love You. 

Drifters, There Goes My Baby, 1959.

Shirelles, Baby it's You, 1961.

Turtles, You Baby, 1966.

Dino Paul Crocetti, better known as Dean Martin, Melancholy Baby. From Steubenville, Ohio, if memory serves, as it usually does.

Dave Bagwill, my favorite Oregon luthier, recommends:

Baby Love - Supremes

 

You Don't Have to be a Baby to Cry - The Caravelles

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dylan on Rick Nelson and James Burton

Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (Simon and Shuster, 2004), p. 13:
 
He was different from  the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross    between a honky-tonk  hero and a barn-dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn't sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you'd never mistake him for a shaman. 

Nosiree, Bob, no shaman was he. There is more interesting material on Nelson in the vicinity of this excerpt. Dylan discusses Ricky Nelson in connection with his 1961 hit, Travelin' Man. But the great guitar work of James Burton to which Dylan alludes was much more in evidence in Hello Mary Lou. The Dylan Chronicles look like they will hold the interest of this old 60's Dylan fanatic.

Here is a better taste of James Burton and his Fender Telecaster with Elvis Presley.  And here he is with the Big O dueling with Springsteen.  Here he jams with Nelson's sons.  Orbison on Nelson.

It has been over thirty years now since Nelson died in a plane crash while touring. The plane, purchased from Jerry Lee Lewis, went down on New Year's Eve 1985. That travelin' man died with his boots on -- as I suspect he would have wanted to. In an interview in 1977 he said that he could not see himself growing old.

Be careful what you wish for.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kitsch, Sentimentality, and Dylan

April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of Deep Purple  became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch: 

When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.

 In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.

Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Theodor Adorno would not approve.

There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it.  Who has time? 

This brings me to Bob Dylan who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s.  In the '60s  I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero.  And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.  

But the Nobel Prize for Literature?  That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and sound bites.  A large theme.  Get to it conservative bloggers.  Why do I have to do all the work?

Dylan's most sentimental song?  I don't know, but Forever Young is in serious contention.  

A long, long way from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding and Visions of Johanna (Marianne Faithful) and Desolation Row. Here is the original of Visions of Johanna. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob, and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets.  So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie.  Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken.  I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky.  But I am not afraid to go.  Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away.  Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension, into "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day.  It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge.  But no more strange  than the idea that  death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1970 Is That All There is?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66 and Kerouac's Favorite Song

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)  Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun.  Kerouac wasn't a driver.  Neal Cassady was the driver.

Now dig Bobby Troup.  And if that's too cool for you, here is Depeche Mode.  Behind the Wheel for good photos of the Mother Road. Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others such as Asleep at the Wheel have covered the tune.

Jack's Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears and mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. 

Another 'river' song in the same plaintive vein is Chase Webster's Moody River from 1961. It has been covered by such artists as Pat Boone, John Fogerty, and Doc Watson.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.  'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now").  This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon  luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music?  Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified! 

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.

Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:

"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart.  [. . .]

Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]

Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs with 'When" in the Title

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out

John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved?  This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.

Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)

Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In

Laura Nyro, And When I Die

Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman

Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece

The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down

Colander Girl

With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl. 

A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . .  Story here.

Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West?  Something.  It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority.  A driver's license is an important document.  The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head.  But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect?  A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.

A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in.  If only she would use her noodle.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'In' Songs

Are you 'in' with the 'in crowd'?

Ramsey Lewis Trio, The 'In' Crowd

Dobie Gray, The 'In' Crowd

Glenn Miller, In the Mood

Beach Boys, In My Room

Beatles, In My Life

Suzi Quatro, Stumblin' In 

Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind 

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'

Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue

Five Satins, In the Still of the Night

Mungo Jerry, In the Summertime. That fabulous and far-off summer of 1970. I was unloading mail trucks at Terminal Annex, Los Angeles. 

Van Morrison, Into the Mystic

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Messages, Letters, etc.

Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman. 

Elvis Presley, Return to Sender

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails. "The letters you wrote me were written in shame/And I know that your conscience still echoes my name."

Son House, Death Letter Blues

Elvis Presley, The U. S. Male

Larry Finnegan, Dear One. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a beer.

Hank Williams, Dear John. "That's all she wrote. I sent your saddle home."

Ricky Nelson, That's All She Wrote

Joe Cocker, The Letter