Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I heard someone commenting on NPR earlier this evening that it would be "impossible to overstate" the impact of Billy Strange on American pop.



Well, I don't mean to pick on the late Mr. Strange, who died on Tuesday. But, no, it wouldn't be impossible at all to overstate his influence. In fact, I'll do it right now:

Billy Strange was without doubt the most influential American pop musician of the 20th and 21st centuries!

Hyperbole is the chronic halitosis of our public discussion. Being the rhetorical equivalent of typing with the CAPS LOCK ON, it's tiresome. (Funny---I just noticed that type on the key cap of the CAPS LOCK key on my MacBook Pro is set in all lowercase characters.) Being the distorter of meaning, it undermines our collective ability to communicate. And in this case, reflexive hyperbole can set up the uninformed (including myself) for disappointment upon investigation. Meaning that it does a disservice to the memory of the deceased. It's cheap.

Yes, Mr. Strange penned some hits (including the horrible "Limbo Rock" for Chubby Checker) and had some enjoyable musical input to the Frank and Nancy Sinatra repertoire of the mid-1960s. And he was a member of the fabulous Wrecking Crew, a noteworthy career milestone with an ensemble that did in fact have an outsized impact on 1960s rock and pop. But, c'mon, leave the poor guy rest in peace, stupid mass media "culture" reporters.

Here's a nice, previously-unseen-by-me video of Billy Strange performing acoustically with meteoric bilingual boner mill Nancy Sinatra (and I say that with the utmost sincerity). Mr. Strange was a competent and accomplished musician. I'll listen for his Wrecking Crew work next time I play the $#!+ out of Pet Sounds.

Bang Bang, Billy Strange with Nancy Sinatra (mid-1960s, provenance unknown [but probably not US TV considering Nancy's lingua franca intro), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.