Music – Page 25 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Clowns

Being hung up on the '60s, there is and will be only one clown for me, Bozo the Clown. After Bozo I had no truck with clowns. I'm a serious man. But I can relate to this segment from the Seinfeld episode, "The Fire." It is one of the funniest in the whole series. But I suppose you had to be there. In the '60s I mean. With Bozo. The Clown. Now some songs featuring clowns.

Roy Orbison, In Dreams. Nice surreal video. "A candy-colored clown they call the sandman . . . ."

James Darren, Goodbye Cruel World. "I'm off to join the circus, gonna be a broken-hearted clown."

Frank Sinatra, Send in the Clowns

A couple of clowns in high places:

Obama the Clown

The Pope is a Buffoon When it Comes to Economics

There is too much buffoonery in high places.

It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!

Read the rest.

I forgot the disgusting Biden the Clown:

Joe Biden the Clown. This article will recall for you Biden's clownish antics in his fall 2012 'debate' with Paul Ryan.

Dion DiMucci on Lennon’s Imagine

At Victor's place.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: “Render unto Caesar the Things that are Caesar’s. . .”

Have you settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue 'Service'? If yes, order up one scotch, one bourbon, one beer and enjoy this live version of Taxman featuring Harrison and Clapton. Stevie Ray Vaughan's blistering version.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Religious Themes

Herewith, five 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 has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan, Traditionalist

The Left owns Dylan as little as it owns dissent. Every Dylanologist will want to read Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece, AWOL from the Summer of Love. It begins like this:

In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender, garrulous—sounded like they were indicting the country for racism (“where black is the color where none is the number”), or prophesying civil war (“you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows”), or inviting young people to smoke dope (“everybody must get stoned”). Fans and would-be acolytes were soon roaming the town on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Eccentric-looking by the standards of the day, they infuriated local residents. Nothing good was going to come of it. One of the town’s more heavily armed reactionaries would later recall:

[A] friend of mine had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things. . . . Creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. . . . I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges really didn’t appeal to me.

The folk singer was Bob Dylan. The reactionary old coot with all the guns . . . well, that was Bob Dylan, too. At age 25, he was growing uncomfortable with the role conferred on him by the music he’d written at age 20. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he would later write in his memoir Chronicles.

And it ends like this:

If Dylan was the voice of a generation, it was not of the generation we think. He belonged to the generation before the one that idolized him, as did The Band. For them, the pre-baby boom frameworks of meaning were all still in place, undeconstructed and deployable in art. One of history’s secrets is that revolutionaries’ appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew. They secure their greatness less by revealing new virtues than by rendering the ones that made them great impracticable henceforth. There is no reason this should be any less true of Dylan. His virtues are not so much of the world he left us with as of the world he helped usher out.

Some selections from The Bootleg Series, #11:

Quinn the Eskimo

Lo and Behold!

One Too Many Mornings

Million Dollar Bash (Take 2)

You Ain't Going Nowhere (Take 2)

The Auld Triangle

Punch Bros. version

Too Much of Nothing (Take 2)

Say to Valerie, say hello to Marion
Give them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.

You Win Again

An old Hank Williams number

Jerry Lee Lewis version

Rock Salt and Nails

Joan Baez's unsurpassable and definitive version

A Fool Such as I

Hank Snow's 1952 version

Just a couple of years before the motorcycle accident:

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

Some, like Jesse Jackson, are still stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford Blues again.

Oxford Town is both topical and timeless. It is about the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. But neither Meredith nor Ole Miss are mentioned. This allows the song to float free of the events of the day and assume its rightful place in the audio aether of Americana.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ordinals and Cardinals > 10

I did zero to ten a couple of years back. What songs can you think of that feature ordinals or cardinals greater than tenth or ten? Well, racking wracking my brains there's

Connie Stevens, Sixteen Reasons. With footage from David Lynch, "Mulholland Drive."

Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song. What a great song! Slow down you hyperkinetic hustlers, you're moving too fast!

Cannibal and the Head Hunters, Land of 1000 Dances. This one goes out to Tom Coleman who probably danced to this at the El Monte Legion Stadium circa '65. "Be there or be square!"

Question Mark and the Mysterians, 96 Tears. Is that a Farfisa organ making that cheesy sound? This one goes out to Colin McGinn.

Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away

Chicago, 25 or 6 to 4

Frank Zappa, Twenty Small Cigars

Tom Waits, Ol '55

Paul Simon, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

Billy Ward and the Dominoes, Sixty Minute Man

Ike Turner, Rocket 88

Beatles, When I'm 64

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. Alternate bootleg take. Arguably better than the album version.

And hundreds more . . .

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weights and Measures

The Band, The Weight

The Byrds, Eight Miles High

The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

The Who, I Can See for Miles

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. So titled because it is In 7/4 time.

Dave Brubeck, Take Five. So titled because it is in 5/4 time.

Cream, Spoonful. Heavy, man.

The Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock

Gene Pitney, 24 Hours from Tulsa

Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement. Gas was cheap in those days.

ZZ Top and Jeff Beck, 16 Tons. Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 #1 version.

Justin Timberlake, et al., 500 Miles. (From Inside Llewyn Davis)

Bobby Bare, 500 Miles Away from Home

UPDATE 2/23:

Lovin' Spoonful, Full Measure. Undeservedly obscure.

St. Valentine’s Day’s Night 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 (2/15):

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.”

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Winning and Losing

Losing and losers win.

Jerry Lee Lewis, You Win Again. Does old Jerry Lee seem to have a high conception of himself? An old Hank Williams tune from 1952.

Emmy Lou Harris, If I Could Only Win Your Love

Allman Bros., Win, Lose or Draw

Beatles, You're Gonna Lose that Girl

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

So boys don't you start your ramblin' around/ 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.

Marty Robbins, Born to Lose

Steely Dan, Rikki Don't Lose that Number. NIce guitar solo. It starts at 2:56.

New Lost City Ramblers, If I Lose, I Don't Care

Brenda Lee, Losing You

Saturday Night at her Oldies: Forgotten and Unforgotten Folkies

Paul Clayton, Wild Mountain Thyme. Baez version from the "Farewell, Angelina" album. A snippet of the same song by Dylan and Baez with a beaming Albert Grossmann looking on. And while we're at it, here is Joan with Farewell, Angelina. Beautiful as it is, it doesn't touch the magical quality of Dylan's own version which is in a dimension by itself.

Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone). Dylan borrowed a bit of the melody and some of the lyrics for his "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Here performed by Marcus Mumford and Justin Hayward-Young.

Dylan talks about Clayton in the former's Chronicles, Volume One, Simon and Shuster, 2004, pp. 260-261.

Mark Spoelstra is also discussed by Dylan somewhere in Chronicles. While I flip through the pages, you enjoy Sugar Babe, It's All Over Now. The title puts me in mind of Dylan's wonderful It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Bonnie Raitt does a good job with it. Or perhaps you prefer the angel-throated Joan Baez. Comparing these two songs one sees why Spoelstra, competent as he is, is a forgotten folkie while Dylan is the "bard of our generation" to quote the ultra conservative Lawrence Auster.

Ah yes, Spoelstra is mentioned on pp. 74-75.

About Karen Dalton, Dylan has this to say (Chronicles, p. 12):

My favorite singer in the place [Cafe Wha?, Greenwich Village] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.

It Hurts Me Too

In My Own Dream.

Same Old Man

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! On to some tunes. 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

Nanci Griffith, 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: Ramblin’ Charles Adnopoz

David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish — as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

[. . .]

"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled. "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz. Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again. Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.' Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie. If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today.

Pretty Boy Floyd. "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home." No? An example of the tendency of lefties invariably to take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.

Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. It grows on you. Give it a chance. Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman. Soul of a Man. Dylan's unforgettable, Don't Think Twice. Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Fortuitous Finds

After a long and leisurely breakfast this morning with Peter Lupu, Mike Valle, and Richard Klaus, I stopped by Bookman's and got lucky. I found a used copy of Milton Steinberg's 1939 novel, As a Driven Leaf. The title is from Job 13: 24-25: "Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face. . . Wilt thou harass a driven leaf?" I learned about this novel from Joseph Epstein's recent WSJ piece, Balancing Faith and Reason.

And then I got lucky in the CD aisle, stumbling upon the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis. I listened to it on the drive home with raindrops on the windshield and tears in my eyes. Here are some tunes from it:

The Last Thing on My Mind

Green, Green Rocky Road

John Lennon 34 Years Later

John Lennon was gunned down this night in 1980 by Mark David Chapman. I remember that night well: a student of mine called me in the middle of it to report the slaying. Lennon was my least favorite Beatle due to his silly utopianism, as expressed in the lyrically inane 'Imagine,' but this tune of his from the 1965 Rubber Soul album is a gem, and more than fit to remember him by.

And I believe he penned Tomorrow Never Knows from the Revolver album, the best song I know of about meditation. It gives me goose bumps still, almost 50 years later.