Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 294

Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

Going a little long today. Also going back to the music history well, because it has been more than a week since I’ve done that, and I don’t want to get stuck on guns, food, Roman history, or military history. (I may do some more military history tomorrow.)

Short shameful confession: I have not had a chance to watch all of these two videos yet. I’m posting them here partially as bookmarks, because they involve two bands that I’m partial to.

“Rebel Truce – The History Of The Clash”

“Fresh Fruit For Rotting Eyeballs”, a documentary about the Dead Kennedys.

Posted in History, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 17, 2021.

Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Phil Spector. This is another one of those where I don’t have much to say, really: everyone knows the story (and if you don’t, it is recapped in the obit).

Sylvain Sylvain, of the New York Dolls.

Peter Mark Richman, actor. He had a long list of credits, including soap operas and a long list of 70’s cop/detective shows…

…including “Mannix”. (“Walk With a Dead Man”, season 3, episode 15.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 283

Friday, January 8th, 2021

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything music related.

“No Fun”, a BBC documentary on the birth of punk rock.

Bonus: “Punk ’76”, another punk documentary. It seems to me that “No Fun” has more coverage of punk in America, while “Punk ’76” is primarily English, and specifically about the punk scene around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s store.

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Obit watch: January 5, 2021.

Tuesday, January 5th, 2021

THR is now reporting the same thing TMZ was reporting yesterday: Tanya Roberts is not dead, in spite of a statement from her rep stating that she was.

Mike Pingel told THR on Monday, “I did get confirmation [of her death], but that was from a very distraught person [Roberts’ boyfriend, Lance O’Brien],” Pingel said.
Pingel added, “And so yes, this morning at 10 a.m. … the hospital did call to say that she was still alive but it’s not looking good. We will hopefully have information [soon]. It’s upsetting.”

If it ain’t a mess, it’ll do until the mess gets here.

Edited to add: The NYT is now officially reporting Ms. Roberts’s death.

Her death, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, was confirmed on Tuesday by her companion, Lance O’Brien. Her publicist, who was given erroneous information, had announced her death to the news media early Monday, and some news organizations published obituaries about her prematurely.

Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers.

Posted in Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 1, 2021.

Friday, January 1st, 2021

Phyllis McGuire, last of the McGuire Sisters.

Ms. McGuire, with her older sisters Christine and Dorothy, shot to success overnight after winning the televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts” contest in 1952. Over the next 15 years, they were one of the nation’s most popular vocal groups, singing on the television variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Andy Williams and Red Skelton, on nightclub circuits across the country and on records that sold millions.
The sisters epitomized a 1950s sensibility that held up a standard of unreal perfection, wearing identical coifs, dresses and smiles, moving with synchronized precision and blending voices in wholesome songs for simpler times. Their music, like that of Perry Como, Patti Page and other stars who appealed to white, middle-class audiences, contrasted starkly with the rock ’n’ roll craze that was taking the world by storm in the mid-to-late ’50s.

Ms. McGuire was also famously linked aromatically with Sam Giancana. Yes, the mobster.

Ms. McGuire remained unapologetic about her relationship with Mr. Giancana. “Sam was the greatest teacher I ever could have had,” she told Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair in 1989. “He was so wise about so many things. Sam is always depicted as unattractive. He wasn’t. He was a very nice-looking man. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t drive a pink Cadillac, like they used to say.”

Richard Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania and Attorney General under Reagan and Bush.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Friday, December 25th, 2020

It isn’t “I Saw Three Ships”, but I stumbled across this on the ‘Tube and knew I had to use it.

Werner Klemperer and John Banner sing. Plus Robert Clary.

Yes, you read that right. Colonel Klink and Sargent Schultz sing “Silent Night”. In German. And then Corporal LeBeau sings, too.

I would make fun of this, but I think all three of them are actually pretty good.

(I don’t think that part about the organ is true.)

Because it is a tradition, and because I really like this:

I like this, too:

This isn’t “I Saw Three Ships”, either, but it is a Christmas song that I like (and haven’t used before) from a totally unexpected source: Annie Lennox sings “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Posted in Christmas, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 24, 2020.

Thursday, December 24th, 2020

A couple of quick music related ones: Chad Stuart, of Chad and Jeremy.

Leslie West, of Mountain. (“Mississippi Queen”.)

Rebecca Luker, noted Broadway actress. She was only 59.

Ms. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s dewy-fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks — mistakenly — that he’s just passing through town.

…

When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in “Mary Poppins” (2006).

Lawrence tipped me off to the death of James E. Gunn, one of the greats in SF.

Gunn launched his career writing short stories for pulp magazines in 1949 and went on to author dozens of books, starting with 1955’s Star Bridge. He saw his 1962 short story “The Immortals,” about a group who discovers the secret to immortality, made into an ABC movie of the week in 1969 and become a 1970-71 hourlong series.
In addition to fiction, Gunn was known as an editor of anthologies and an author of academic works. He earned a Hugo for 1983’s Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, an exploration of famed author Isaac Asimov’s contributions to the science fiction genre.

…

In 1969, he taught one of the first classes at a major university on science fiction, becoming a pioneer for treating the genre as a serious academic subject. He created a $1.5 million endowment for the James E. and Jane F. Gunn Professorship in Science Fiction, named for himself and his late wife, in 2014.

That’s one part of his career that I’m afraid will get short shrift. As important as he was as a writer and critic, his most important contribution to the genre may have been as a teacher.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 267

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020

I’m going to ride this Christmas donkey until it drops.

(No, that’s just a Rifftrax promo clip, that’s not the full movie. Though I believe you can find the full movie on YouTube.)

And now for something completely different: “Never Mind The Baubles – Christmas ’77 with The Sex Pistols”.

Johnny Rotten handed out badges, posters and other Sex Pistols-branded goodies. Teens and young children hit the dancefloor with Sid Vicious to boogie to pop hits such as Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie and (yes, really) Daddy Cool by Boney M. Then Rotten leapt into a giant Christmas cake and the band and audience smeared each other with food.

Bonus: I’m kind of marginal about “Retail Archaeology”, but “A Very Dead Mall Christmas” provided me with about 15 minutes worth of amusement.

Bonus #2: “Cooking for the Queen At Christmas”.

Posted in Christmas, Food, History, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Monday, December 21st, 2020

50 years ago today, on December 21, 1970, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, met with one of the greatest singers of all time, Elvis Presley, at the White House.

The story goes that Elvis requested the meeting with Nixon, as he wanted the president to appoint him a “federal agent at large” in what was then known as the “Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs”. (BNDD merged into the DEA in 1973.) Elvis believed he could be a force for good and fight drug use among the young people.

Smithsonian magazine has a slightly different version of the story (written by the great Peter Carlson):

The story began in Memphis a few days earlier, when Elvis’ father, Vernon, and wife, Priscilla, complained that he’d spent too much on Christmas presents—more than $100,000 for 32 handguns and ten Mercedes-Benzes. Peeved, Elvis drove to the airport and caught the next available flight, which happened to be bound for Washington. He checked into a hotel, then got bored and decided to fly to Los Angeles.

…

Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. “The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”

Anyway, Elvis wrote a letter to Nixon (reproduced here, transcription here) asking for the position and a badge. There was some internal discussion at the White House, but presidential aide Egil “Bud” Krogh persuaded Nixon to agree to the meeting.

That personal gift Elvis mentions in his letter? It was a Colt .45. I have seen it asserted both that the Secret Service confiscated it before Elvis got in to see Nixon, and that Elvis got it past the guards and personally presented it to Nixon.

Nixon’s famous taping system had not yet been installed, so the conversation wasn’t recorded. But Krogh took notes: “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. The President then indicated that those who use drugs are also those in the vanguard of anti-American protest.”
“I’m on your side,” Elvis told Nixon, adding that he’d been studying the drug culture and Communist brainwashing.

Elvis asked for a BNDD badge, and Nixon basically said “Make it so.”

Before leaving, Elvis asked Nixon to say hello to Schilling and West, and the two men were escorted into the Oval Office. Nixon playfully punched Schilling on the shoulder and gave both men White House cuff links.
“Mr. President, they have wives, too,” Elvis said. So Nixon gave them each a White House brooch.
After Krogh took him to lunch at the White House mess, Elvis received his gift—the narc badge.

The meeting was kept secret at the time: Jack Anderson covered it a year later, but apparently nobody actually gave a tinker’s damn back then.

Today:

Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of Rights or even the Constitution of the United States, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley’s visit to the White House.

You can download copies of the photos from the George Washington University National Security Archive (their site has been a major help in writing this). NARA has a site devoted to the meeting, but it is annoying as all get out. You can order a print here, as well as some other related merchandise.

“Bud” Krogh apparently wrote a book about the meeting (called, fittingly, The Day Elvis Met Nixon (affiliate link)) which I believe is out of print but readily available from Amazon.

Posted in Elvis, Guns, History, Music, Nixon | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 261

Wednesday, December 16th, 2020

A handful of short and selfish videos today.

From the “Food Wishes” channel, a couple of things I’m bookmarking because I’d like to try them:

“Homemade Eggnog Recipe – How to Make Classic Christmas Eggnog”.

I just bought a bottle of 18 year old rum. But I’m lazy, so I may just purchase a good commercial eggnog (like the Promised Land Dairy one) and add rum to that.

Speaking of rum, “Hot Buttered Rum”.

Not food, just for grins: Mireille Mathieu sings “La Marseillaise” in 1989 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for its centennial. And it has English subtitles. I am currently immersed in the French Revolution block of the “Revolutions” podcast, so this is relevant to my interests.

Last one: “No Regrets: The life and music of Edith Piaf”, a short (about 15 minutes) documentary from France 24 English.

Posted in Bookmarks, Food, History, Music | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 13, 2020.

Sunday, December 13th, 2020

Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.

In the meantime, Charley Pride.

A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”

…

Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.

NYT obit for Ben Bova.

Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.

Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.

The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”

…

Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.

I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.

On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…

…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”

“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Friday, December 11th, 2020

The holiday is only two weeks away, so here’s a little morning musical interlude to cheer you up and put you in the spirit.

Posted in 1970s, Christmas, Music, TV | Comments Closed

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