The Buckinghams made Joe Zawinul a lot of bread with their peppy cover of this extra-mellow number he wrote for the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1966. The Buckinghams version was a hit in the spring of 1967, during weather just like we're having in the backfilled swamp called Champaign, Illinois, by its Caucasoid settlers. So I'm putting it up here tonight as a bit of multisensory nostalgia for myself. I am a fan of the Buckinghams performance, but the original version isn't heard widely enough for my tastes. Besides, I think the Cannonball version even got some AM radio airplay in Chicago during spring 1967, but maybe on a "straight" station like WIND, WGN, or the thousand-watt wonder WBEE. So here it is.
Cannonball has long been a favorite of mine, busting onto the New York scene in the mid-50s sounding much like Charlie Parker, to my ear, without being a copycat. He was a meticulous technician on the alto, more deliberate and less of a daredevil than Bird; not as fast in terms of "clock speed," but always full of power, self-assurance, invention, and joy dee veever. There are no Cannonball acrobatics on this classic piece of soul jazz, though. The session was recorded live at "The Club," which was actually a large recording studio outfitted with a bar, tables, and invited guests for "the club atmosphere." One thing I enjoy about the whole album, which is entitled "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," of course, is how Cannon loves holding forth for the audience between numbers in his rich, stately voice. He had that easy manner with an audience that is needed to transform a great musician into a beloved entertainer.
Regarding my April 14 post on the topic of Farmer Daddy Brand (TM) asparagus, old pal Anonymous asks the eternal question: "Are you sure those roots aren't upside down?"
There are a number of fairly plausible reasons why one might plant asparagus ass-up in the rich Illinois soil. But I'm going to have to go with "gut ignorance" on this one. See, they give you a set of occult details on how to prepare an asparagus bed --- how deep the trench, how much manure at bottom, how much soil over the "crowns," etc. But they never fucking tell you that the "crowns" point downward into the dirt, unlike any other crown devised by man or god. So I double-checked with the friendly girl at the nursery and she said I could just pluck them up and capsize them back down. Which I did. But now I've probably got them too deep in the pure manure so they may not like that.
If I have to start over, at least this time I'll only have to dig 6 inches out of the trench to re-prepare the bed, and there won't be any major root-busting or rubble excavation to put up with.
Time for a story. Once upon a time Old MacDaddy dug a big trench in his back yard, removed more dirt, roots, broken glass, bricks, and chunks of patio concrete than you could shake a stick at. Then he covered the bottom of the trench with manure (regrettably, not his own), then a very special blend of natural and store-bought soil, and dug little holes with a pointed stick to make new homes for 16 of his best asparagus friends (who had been living on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator for a month). Then he planted the asparagi, made cute little mounds of potting soil around them, and took a picture. Finally he fed them some nice fresh water. And that's how Farmer Daddy Brand Asparagus (TM) began its new life. The end. Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!
I yam! I could tell tales of physical prowess, ditchdiggery, lumberjackery. But I'm on hiatus, working through some sort of surprise urge to turn the world green and feed all the little birdies. So make up some tales yourself! In the meantime, I share the following words from the final pages of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an instructive 700-page tome by Manly P. Hall (1928):
Ptolemy has been ridiculed for conceiving the earth to be the center of the universe, yet modern civilization is seemingly founded upon the hypothesis that the planet earth is the most permanent and important of all the heavenly spheres, and that the gods from their starry thrones are fascinated by the monumental and epochal events taking place upon this spherical ant-hill in Chaos.
Kanyon was a minor figure during the WCW "invasion" of the WWF back around the turn of the century, when professional wrestling was still entertaining. Beer-D reminded me that he was mainly known for entering the ring spouting some sort of lame monologue that ended with the rhetorical question "Who better than Kanyon?" Then, just about anyone would enter the ring and kick is ass seven ways for Sunday. It was his role. HuffingtonPost wants to make something of the fact that he was openly gay, but I doubt that gayness is particularly rare in the wrestling racket. In fact, gayness (and gaylike styling weirdness) were professional wrestling conventions for awhile, and treated in a fairly matter-of-fact manner insofar as opponents of the gay characters never resorted to any particularly homophobic invective. Professional wrestling must be one of the hardest things in the world to do, and "detraining" from it has to be much more complex than retiring from a mainstream athletic career due to the toll of steroids and brutal physical punishment. Peace, Chris.
Herb "Herbie" Cohen was a picaresque character, evidently capable of being a major league motherfucker, who was tightly enmeshed in the careers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits, plus a menagerie of unlikely lesser lights. The Barry Miles critical biography of Zappa tells of Herbie's alleged mismanagement of and skimming from Zappa's various record labels, not to mention a previous career selling weapons of war to African insurgencies and manning the barricades for the Mothers of Invention at a 1969 Berlin concert in which the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction) turned things very scary for the group. Herbie was the subject of many in-jokes on Zappa's albums from the '70s, but they eventually had a non-amicable parting of the ways late in the decade. You can see Herbie rising like a wraith from a crack in the pavement in the surreal wraparound painting (verso) for the cover of Zappa's 1973 Over-Nite Sensation. Now he's a wraith for real.
Oh, and get back to bed! I don't wanna hear a peep outta ya! Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Some day I'm gonna be happy / But I don't know when just now
Old friend Larry K. was quite precocious, critical-analysis-wise, as compared most denizens of my suburban Chicago high school (not including Gurlitzer, of course). I remember him explaining back around sophomore or junior year why he liked rock and roll: each song was like a small unit of Truth, packaged in a 3-minute piece of music. To illustrate, he pointed to this song --- "Lies" by The Knickerbockers. And even more specifically, to the two-line extract above the video. I've always felt Larry's aphorism was highly pertinent, and a pretty good criterion for rapid assessment of a pop song's general worth.
As for this group, I knew little without referring to The Wikipedia. A bit of irony related to Larry K's identification of this late 1965 tune with Truth is that it is a dead-on knockoff of The Fab Four about a year and a half earlier. That observation never troubled my opinion of this little rocker, though, because it's energetic, tight, and respects its inspirational material. When I first saw the video I was going to comment on the gratuitous use of a tenor sax as prop for vocalist "Buddy Randell," but the wiki writeup indicates he actually played the thing in real life. Apparently not on this cut, however.
It's funny that these guys are trying so hard to sound like the original British Invasion band but aren't trying so hard to look that way. The suits kind of say "British Invasion," but most of the guys just barely manage to simulate the archetypal haircut (which was already pretty much out of fashion by the anyway). All rely on generous nerdles of "greasy kid stuff" (look it up), and "Randell" is looking quite a bit like a less-ugly version of Wayne "CC Rider" Cochran. That's because "Randell's" recording heyday was in the previous decade, scoring a big hit as Bill Crandle with The Royal Teens on the godawful "Short Shorts" from 1958 (sez Wikipedia).
As regular readers know, I cannot close this post without rating the go-go dancers. I think it's a pretty prime performance --- they add visual rhythm and freewheeling party atmosphere. The ladies know what they're doing, movement-wise, managing both free-form individuality and exuberant synchrony at once. The fine art of go-go dancing was ruined, in my opinion, by the self-consciously "freestyle" arrhythmic thrashing that emerged with psychedelia, and then, later, by the highly contrived efforts to prepackage dancing feminine sexual allure through excessive coaching and wardrobery.
Update: on reflection I think I have something backwards re the dancers. If refreshed memory serves, they wouldn't have called the gals in this video "go-go dancers." I think that term applied to the dancers they started displaying in cages (yes, cages) around mid-1966, perched on pedestals flanking the bands. The classic go-go dancer would have worn a mini-skirt and calf-sheathing go-go boots like the ones first fetished by Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, in her winter 1966 hit. Then came the cages, and the acid-propelled go-go spazzery started showing up about a year after that. (This all comes from grade school memory, so I stand to be corrected by any cultural historians out there.)
Oh, okay --- double feature. Truth? Maybe not. But Beauty of a sort:
...or, I Want This Motherfuckin' Bat Out My Motherfuckin' House!!!
Judas Priest! I'm trying to finish the iPad post and I hear this skittering skud, sort of like a dry leaf blowing across the floor in another room. Could be the wind, but the windows aren't that far open and the air outside is calm. Flying insect? OK, whatever. Mouse? Don't like 'em, but I have my ways of dealing with them. But uh-uh: there's a motherfuckin' BAT, as I say, about the size of a motherfuckin' crow, bouncing around the kitchen light like it thinks it's a moth! Its wingspan --- no kidding --- was about 12 inches! From crown to tail thingie, it was almost 5 inches long.
Do you know how to get a bat out of your house at bedtime? Well, I don't. Forfeiting the opportunity for YouTube fame, because I didn't feel like screwing around with the iPod Nano video camera but did very much feel like getting the bat out of my kitchen, I engaged in an absurd session of chase-the-motherfuckin'-bat-out-the-motherfuckin-house, armed with an Australian truncheon brought back from a vacation by DoubleE and a cardboard mailer. The object was to shepherd the bat toward one of the two open doors, at which time its famed sonar would show him the way to freedom in the wild black yonder. But it didn't. I did herd it to the open living/dining areas, but the creature just strafed me to continually for almost 10 minutes and had no interest in the open doors. Regrettably, then, I had to opt for a less humane mode of eviction, namely one involving a Crossman BB rifle. Not really my style, but then neither is sharing my home with flying rats. Extra pills and booze for me tonight.
Xeni Jardin --- who is hip enough even for me, I guess --- has a gratuitously heady hands-on review of the iPad, sounding like a smitten fangirl. ("iPad fappery," one of the commenters calls it.) Well, her words at least make me wonder about my initial summary dismissal of the device. She assures us that the form factor is just right --- perfect in weight and tactile sensuality. That happens to be my greatest doubt about the iPad, i.e., that it could possibly have great ergonomics for much of what it is designed to do. We'll see. I still think it's a case of trying to improve Hostess Twinkies by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. Or maybe more to the point, trying to improve a Ghirardelli 72 percent chocolate bar by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. And anyway, just look at the docked iPad with that wireless keyboard: how does that go together, design-wise?
Here's a nighty-night song for the first summerlike day in my neck of the Corn Belt. I listened to it during an excruciating run through the sunny breeze wearing a Teflon-coated tee shirt inside of which sweat condenses and drains instead of wicking. The video accompanying "Don't Worry Baby" is totally wrong for the music. The tune is a sprightly but pensive teen beat, fraught with portent. Our hero has failed to keep his mouth shut when he bragged about his car, but he can't back down now because he pushed the other guys too far. But The Love of His Baby is promised to get him all horny for a win. Yet it somehow sounds both innocent and important if you sustain credulity. It's a sweet sound: barber shop quartet sounds for the Pepsi Generation, perhaps suitable for a nice fox trot in the back of the gym.
Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!
A spring break edition for two very special little men. And also for that healthcare-loving, ballcutting harridan Nancy Pelosi, who has put The Fear of Grandma into bedwetting wingnuts everywhere.
A city I've never been to, but intend to visit on the recommendation of the lads. A place where the panhandlers are polite and even the meth-heads do their best to make a stranger feel welcome. And the only piece of litter to sit on the ground for more than 5 minutes was one that Beer-D and Big Rock Head threw there as an experiment, then later picked up and threw away just like all the townies do.
Update: Here's a little background on Pelosi's attitude, from The Politico (which is insignificant to me) via TPM (which isn't). It seems that Madame Speaker elbowed her way past the chiseled visage of Rahm Emanuel to get all simpatico with the President on HCR. Haha!
The following is the transcript of a brief conversation, edited to eliminate digressions, between RubberCrutch and Rudy, the latter of whom having borrowed a shovel, had now returned it and was slumped against Big Rock Head's Mazda. His flesh was the color of window putty, but then again it is always that color. Big Rock Head and a neighbor who Rudy calls "Schmuck-meat" are bystanders and catalysts:
RC: Are you OK, Rudy? Rudy: No. RC (stoically, after a beat): You're not? Rudy (irritably): Yeah, I'm OK! I always breathe like this 'cuz I have congestive heart failure!
I regret that she never stopped by the house to sing this to me in person. Oh well.
Even though this tune is embedded in my substrate, memories are elusive, scrambled. And my memory check on the web transmuted it into a bit of an enigma. A month ago I'd have sworn it was a languid bossa nova composed for Astrud Gilberto by her erstwhile husband Joao. But it looks like memory conflated Dusty Springfield's 1967 performance with a too-upbeat, too-grandiose rendition by Sergio Mendez and Brazil '66 a year later. I know you all don't give a shit about my confusion, but some superficial googling only cleared up part of it yet revealed new puzzles. (I will file this post under a new label: "Thinking Too Much.")
One YouTube uploader claims that the backup band on this lovely arrangement is the Tijuana Brass, but it just sounds too tasteful and understated for that to be accurate. Yet a "long" version of the song, also posted to YouTube, is marred by a weird, tacked-on, muffled 20-second instrumental outchorus that sounds very much like the TJB heard through a bad earache. I've embedded a shorter edit here to exclude that audio carbuncle. The tenor soloist sounds like Stan Getz subtoning with Astrud Gilberto on "The Girl From Ipanema" several years earlier. But the performance seems weak, so it may be a Getz impersonator... from the TJB? Anyway, this arrangement, minus the expunged crappy outchorus, is fully carried by a quiet rhythm section: a guitar, an electric piano, and percussion. (So maybe that was how got a classy performance from the TJB back then --- send them all out to the strip club across the street except for the rhythm section, and give them a nice chart to play.) And furthermore, Dusty (to my ear) does indeed sound like Astrud to some extent in her breathiness and phrasing.
What does seem clear about the provenance of "The Look Of Love" is that it was a musical highlight in the 1967 James Bond parody version of Casino Royale (starring Peter Sellers), and that there are two recordings of it (movie soundtrack and single). And that the title ditty to that same film, called "Casino Royale" of course, was recorded by Herb Alpert and the TJB, and it charted much better than Dusty's version. And that the 1968 Sergio Mendez recording did much better in the states than did Dusty's definitive rendition.
So who the fuck knows? I was expecting this to be a three-sentence post. Anyway, just listen to Dusty Springfield's pensive treatment of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition. (More news to me!) But this is not "lounge music" or "easy listening," as it is glibly labeled by various DJs and fans. Not at all. It's an American standard.
[Editor's note: updated to provide some sorely needed coherence.]
It's Friday evening so I don't want to get too deep into anything, but here's what I consider to be a huge idea that is simple enough for a high school economics student to understand. It's called The General Theory of Second Best, the title of an article explaining an economic model referred to by economists as "Lipsey-Lancaster." I first heard of it a week or two ago on Eschaton in a sort-of throwaway post by Atrios (who is an economist). I'm a nonspecialist in pretty much everything except Simple Country Editing (TM), but this theory is so darn simple that it seems impossible to argue with. That is, I don't see why it's not declared a Law instead of a mere Theory.
The crux of the theory, as I understand it, seems to be this: we don't exist in a perfect world, so therefore it is inevitable that many aspects of it are unavoidably non-optimal. That seems like a noncontroversial statement. Well, so what?
This: for 30-plus years U.S. public policy has been driven primarily by the myth of the perfect free market, and how this myth applies not only to economics but purportedly every other domain of life (such as "the marketplace of ideas"). The ideologies of laissez-faire economics (and its pernicious soul sister, Libertarianism) are based on the concept that if we all just leave everything alone, selfish individuals will collectively behave in the greater interest of society because the Free Market Faeiries (as Atrios calls them) will make everything function perfectly. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and fan of all things dumb such as South Park, refers to certain shibboleths of free market economics as The Underpants Gnomes Theory of [Fill In]: Phase 1 --- declare that free markets are perfect; Phase 2 --- ???; Phase 3 --- a ideal economy!
The unwavering belief in the failed ideas of free-market economics by our ruling elites has poisoned the public discourse, bankrupted governments, and enabled financial services corporations to loot the wealth of the U.S. middle and working classes... repeatedly... for decades. And these ideas are based on a demonstrable (if not provable) fallacy: that free markets always function perfectly without government intervention or regulation. But it seems that over 40 years ago, some guys named Lipsey and Lancaster put forth the outlandish idea that we don't live in a perfect world, but instead in a second-best world. Nothing can always be "optimal." And sometimes, lots of things are very sub-optimal indeed. And that unless your idea of an ideal market is one that deliberately creates speculative bubbles to scam wealth from middle-class investors, and your idea of enlightened self-interest is to profiteer while almost 20 percent of the population is unemployed or severely underemployed, then someone has to do something about it.
Lipsey-Lancaster seems like such a simple, bulletproof idea in its basic form that it's hard for me to understand (1) why a well informed person like me never heard of it until 2 weeks ago and (2) why it isn't invoked as a knockdown argument every time some know-nothing wingnut policy wonk lectures us about "government takeovers."
[Editor's note: the previous essay was hastily written and not meticulously sourced because the author is late for his Friday Evening Prayer Meeting. Also, it's too long because he didn't have time to write a short one.]
The tune is new to me, but Rosetta Tharpe and Lucky Millinder sure ain't.
"Now he's my king / he makes me sing / four or five times."
Rosetta Tharpe, usually referred to with the prefix name "Sister," spent most of her career shouting gospel over her own guitar accompaniment. The Wikipedia writeup refers to it as "early rock and roll" guitar, but she was playing this style as early as the 19 fucking '30s! You have to hear it to believe it. Either she invented it, or one of her direct influences did. (The Wikipedia article seems poorly edited, incomplete, and lacking focus, so don't take it as the "gospel" truth nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK d'0h! So I'm writing some of this purely from a partially faulty memory.)
Anyway, Sister Tharpe brought her manic gospel shouting style to popular music early in the Big Band era, and I believe most of her recorded performances were with Lucky Millinder's band. In this setting she sang purely secular songs, or tunes that might be interpreted as either secular or sacred (like the Staples Singers did decades later). It should also be noted that Sister Tharpe was quite a showboat even in gospel settings, and her third marriage was sanctified in front of 25,000 paying customers at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, 1951. That ceremony was followed, of course, by a gospel set for the crowd.
Lucky Millinder is one of my favorite big band leaders. He wasn't an artist with a capital A like Ellington, and he didn't create a whole new jazz-blues sound like Basie, but he was everywhere for a time, backing up big-name vocalists (in the "race music" industry) like Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, and others. Millinder and his ensembles provided dance music and entertainment without lofty artistic pretensions. The charts popped, the bands swung with the best, and everything (to my ears) always sounded tight and ultra-professional.
This is what it looks like on a clear night at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, if you're Dr. Manhattan. Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!
With the sun climbing to about 35 degrees at high noon these days here at the 40th parallel, I'm already starting to get nostalgic about Winter 2010. How about you? Good. Here:
"Shh! Don't tell my mother. She still thinks I'm in the army."
StuporMundi is no more for what he thought was H20 was H2SO4
This is the second time I've borrowed that rhyme from a Scholastic Book Service volume of dumb kid humor. The first time was when I was in 4th grade, and that "borrowing" was in fact my one and only act of plagiarism ever (that I can recall).
Long live RubberCrutch. Best wishes to the rest of you, too.
Ladies! Just look at these Invasion-era cutie-pies: The Walker Brothers!
Check out the bouncer who pushes a coupla kids away at the lower-left side of the screen right at the beginning. "Sorry lads, strictly business, you know." Lots of teenie-boppers of all genders probably wanted a piece of Scott, John, and Gary "Walker" in their heyday. In fact, in this clip it looks like most of the audience members are dudes!?! Anyway, personally, I'm partial to Scott's casual-yet-gentlemanly "mod" suit, but I'm sure plenty of you can't take your eyes off that electric ant hill John is packin' below the belt, not to mention the tantalizing glimpse of midriff. Gary, on traps, is wearing a sweater that Big Otis might have purchased at Zayre in Canterbury Gardens to jazz up his sophomore junior wardrobe.
The acoustics in the TV studio are just celestial, and when the crowd does sing-along backgrounds on the chorus it sounds like a host of archangels. Can't figure out where they stashed the orchestra, though.
To my 5th-grade 7th-grade ears, this sounded like a Very Important Song, and I imagined the Walkers to be grown-ups just like Frank Sinatra. But they appear to have been expatriate American surfer dudes who found a niche in Swinging London. I could, and have, listened to this song over and over again. But even as a runt I felt that the composer wasn't even trying when he penned that lame bridge. (Even if you don't know what the "bridge" is, you'll know it right away in this song; it's the part where it sounds like a page of the score was missing so everybody just faked it for eight measures. Too bad the nice German man talks over the out-chorus, but I still think it's a primo clip.
Update: temporal references corrected, with thanks to Big Hussein Otis.
Enough is enough! I have had it with this motherfucking snake and this motherfucking baby! Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!
RubberCrutch, 14-watt illuminatus and man about town, earns his living as a simple country editor, as if toiling on a chain gang beside Larry Fine, making little sentences out of big ones.
He has 30 years of professional experience in written and visual communications, including journalism, public relations, advertising, technical publishing, and photography. In connection with some of those roles he has won several unimportant awards.
[Editor's note: in archived Fifty50 posts, all references to one "StuporMundi" in fact pertain to our hero, RubberCrutch, unless otherwise noted. Thank you for your attention in this matter.]
It is the mission of this weblog to offer you, at least half the time, an assortment of essays and pictures pertaining to current events, aesthetic studies, psychological inquiries, and everyday tomfoolery, presented in a jocular setting that is suitable for Mom, Pop, Junior, and Sis, as long as Mom and Sis do not object to literature that sometimes contains words such as "asshole" and "fuck."
