Mike Bloomfield, Carmelita Skiffle
Warren Zevon, Carmelita
Billy Joel, Piano Man
Don MacLean, American Pie
Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Arlo Guthrie, The City of New Orleans
Category: Music
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Solitary, Alone, Lonely, Lonesome
Neil Diamond, Solitary Man. Johnny Cash does it better. Nothing better than the sound of an acoustic guitar, well-made, well-played, steel-stringed, with fresh strings. This one goes out to Dave Bagwill.
Calexico, Alone Again Or. Original by Love, an underrated '60s psychedelic band.
Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely
While we have the Big O cued up, here is Oh, Pretty Woman, a contender for greatest R & R song, what with its unique blend of the Dionysian and the tender. Legendary sideman James Burton and Bruce Springsteen trade licks on their Telecasters. Burton was the man behind the guitar fills and leads in the early Ricky Nelson hits such as Hello Mary Lou. This one goes out to my wife Mary Lou on this our 33rd wedding anniversary. "I knew Mary Lou we'd never part/So hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart."
Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo
Stay free from petty jealousy
Live by no man's code
Save your judgment for yourself
Lest you wind up on this road.
Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Whatever happened to William Zantzinger? Well, he died at 69 in 2009. NYT obituary here.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fighting Songs
Some of us are old enough to remember when he fought and bragged under the name, 'Cassius Clay.' Later known as Muhammad Ali, the great boxer died yesterday in Scottsdale at age 74. I won't comment on the man except to wonder how much of Donald Trump's braggadoccio and argumentative tactics were inspired by him.
Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer. "A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."
Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man
Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.
It's worse than ever. Liberal policies have turned Chicago into a first-rate killing field.
Og Boo Dirty, Let Dem Hos Fight. So what's this inspiring ditty a commentary on? For contrast:
Youngbloods, Get Together
Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans
Addendum (6/5). The following from Wikipedia. Does it remind you of someone?
"Talking trash"
Ali regularly taunted and baited his opponents—including Liston, Frazier, and Foreman—before the fight and often during the bout itself. Ali's pre-fight theatrics were almost always highly entertaining, and his words were sometimes cutting, and were largely designed to promote the fight. His antics often targeted a particular psychological trigger or vulnerability in his opponent that would provoke a reaction and cause the opponent to lose focus. He said Frazier was "too dumb to be champion", that he would whip Liston "like his Daddy did", that Terrell was an "Uncle Tom" and that Patterson was a "rabbit." In speaking of how Ali stoked Liston's anger and overconfidence before their first fight, one writer commented that "the most brilliant fight strategy in boxing history was devised by a teenager who had graduated 376 in a class of 391."[125]
Ali typically portrayed himself as the "people's champion" and his opponent as a tool of the (white) establishment (despite the fact that his entourage often had more white faces than his opponents'). During the early part of Ali's career, he built a reputation for predicting rounds in which he would finish opponents, often vowing to crawl across the ring or to leave the country if he lost the bout.[16] Ali admitted he adopted the latter practice from "Gorgeous"George Wagner, a popular professional wrestling champion in the Greater Los Angeles Area who drew thousands of fans to his matches as "the man you love to hate."[16]
ESPN columnist Ralph Wiley called Ali "The King of Trash Talk."[129] In 2013, The Guardian said Ali exemplified boxing's "golden age of trash talking."[130]The Bleacher Report called Clay's description of Sonny Liston smelling like a bear and his vow to donate him to a zoo after he beat him the greatest trash talk line in sports history.[131]
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Did Johnny Mercer Ever Write Songs Like These?
Just Like a Woman, Cutting Edge take. Blonde on Blonde version.
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry, Cutting Edge take. Perhaps you prefer Mercer's On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.
It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Dylan can, and has, written the sorts of conventional, schmaltzy songs that Mercer, Berlin, and the other contributors to the Great American Songbook wrote. But could they have written songs like the above? And they are only a small sample.
This is partial justification of last week's claim that Dylan is America's greatest writer of popular songs. Bar none. Might there be some generational chauvinism at work here?
Not Dark Yet: Bob Dylan Turns 75 Today
25 things you might want to know know about Dylan. Excellent, except for the introductory claim that he is "rock's greatest songwriter." A better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none. We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples. Maybe this Saturday night. His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre. I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.
These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart. No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here.Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin':
The Ballad of Hollis Brown Performed by Stephen Stills.
North Country Blues. Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.
D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back. I saw it in '67 when it first came out. I just had to see it, just as I had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic. No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
May he die with his boots on. It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tools and Middle-Sized Dry Goods
Albert King, Crosscut Saw
Peter, Paul, and Mary, If I Had a Hammer
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails
Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Shotgun
Bobby Darin, Mack the Knife
Chance McCoy and the Appalachian String Band, Gospel Plow
Jackie DeShannon, Needles and Pins
Linda Ronstadt, Silver Threads and Golden Needles
Out of ideas, for now.
50 years ago, this May: Bob Dylan and the Manchester Free Trade Hall 'Judas' Show
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Luck, Good and Bad
Big Mama Thornton, Born Under a Bad Sign
Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Born Under a Bad Sign
Ray Charles, Busted. Made the #4 slot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 1963.
Elvis Presley, Good Luck Charm
Lightnin' Slim, Bad Luck Blues
Ray Charles, That Lucky Old Sun
Sonny Boy Williamson, Bad Luck Blues
Tommy Johnson, Canned Heat Blues, 1928. Interesting guitar work and an eerie falsetto. Sterno may light your fire but don't drink the stuff. And now you know where Canned Heat got their name.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia
Punch Brothers, Rye Whisky
Lonely Heartstring Band, Ramblin' Gamblin' Willy
Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer
Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know
Bobby Bare, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies
Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line
The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona. A very nice cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason
The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles
Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler. 'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name.
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails
Patsy Cline, She's Got You
Prince? Prince who?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Foolish’ Songs for the Day after April Fool’s Day
I may be a day late and a dollar short, but here for your auditory amusement are some tunes in celebration or bemoanment of human folly the chief instance of which is romantic love. Who has never been played for a fool by a charming member of the opposite sex? Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there.
Elvis Presley, A Fool Such as I
Ricky Nelson, Poor Little Fool. Those "carefree devil eyes" will do it every time.
Brenda Lee, Fool #1
The Shirelles, Foolish Little Girl
Ricky Nelson, Fools Rush In. "Fools rush in/Where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/So how are they to know?"
Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. Sage advice.
Elvin Bishop, Fooled Around and Fell in Love
Kingston Trio, Some Fool Made a Soldier of Me
Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Fool
Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, My Foolish Heart
Bill Evans, Foolish Heart
Lesley Gore, She's a Fool
Paul McCartney, The Fool on the Hill
Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools
Connie Francis, Everybody's Somebody's Fool
Grateful Dead, Ship of Fools
Frank Sinatra, I'm a Fool to Want You
Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection
Herewith, some 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.
Johnny Cash, Redemption
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 has something to say.
George Harrison, My Sweet Lord
George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.
Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean
Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Passing Through
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."
Related articles
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Days of the Week
Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday
Mamas and Papas, Monday, Monday
Marianne Faithfull, Ruby Tuesday. Moodier than the Stones' original. She does a great version of Dylan's Visions of Johanna.
Simon and Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning 3 AM
Donovan, Jersey Thursday
Easybeats, Friday on My Mind
Sam Cooke, Another Saturday Night
Saturday night is many a Fool's Paradise. Take a lesson, muchachos. Mose Allison's version.
Tom Waits, The Ghosts of Saturday Night. One of the best by this latter-day quasi-Kerouac.
Bonus cut: Jerry Lee Lewis, Lonely Weekend
St. Valentine’s Eve 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 of a Saturday night 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: The Perils of Pleasure on the Lost Highway
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:
. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)
From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:
I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highwayJust a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman's lies make a life like mine
On the day we met, I went astray
I started rollin' down that lost highwayI was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highwayNow boys don't start your ramblin' 'round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you'll curse the day.
You started rollin' down that lost highway.
Tom Petty version.
The Byrds, Life in Prison
Warren Zevon, Carmelita
Nina Simone, House of the Rising Sun
Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. The Kingston Trio's 'collegiate folk' version from 1958.
Merle Haggard, The Fugitive
Marty Robbins, Devil Woman
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs Suggestive of Chess
Bob Dylan, Queen Jane Approximately
Bob Seger, Night Moves
Jerry Lee Lewis, You Win Again
Beatles, I'm a Loser
Bob Dylan, Only a Pawn in Their Game
Frank Sinatra, The Tender Trap
Los Bravos, Black is Black
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low.
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head"
Beatles, When I'm 64
Stanley Brothers, Rank Strangers
Megadeth, Endgame. This one goes out to Dale Tuggy who likes this stuff.
Tommy Edwards, It's All in the Game
Yes, Your Move
. . . Make the white queen run so fast she hasn't got time
to make you a wife
'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and
it's news is captured for the queen to use
Move me on to any black square
Use me anytime you want
Just remember that the goal
Is for us all to capture all we want, anywhere
Don't surround yourself with yourself
Move on back two squares
Send an instant karma to me
Initial it with loving care
Don't surround yourself
'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and
it's news is captured for the queen to use . . .
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 pointed 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.
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 1/17: 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 335TD. But then I did the dumbest thing I ever did a few years later.