Category: Music

Why Typos Don’t Matter and the Musical Watershed That Was the ‘Fifties

An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together

Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical hang-ups here.  My friend is an old Keroauc aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives.   Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen?  My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.

A curious watershed era it was in which  the sweet & tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse.  Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music.  "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."  That was actually played on the radio in the '50s.  To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing.  And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."

I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic.  The prime example?  Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.  One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!'  Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Four Black Barbara’s

Barbara George, I Know.  A cute ditty from late 1961, 'I Know' made the Billboard Hot 100  #3 spot in the U.S. George counts as a one-hit wonder at least on one definition of the term.  She left the music business by the end of the '60s and died in 2006.

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing. This great R & B number made it into the Billboard top ten in 1962.

Barbara Lewis, Baby I'm Yours.  From June 1965.  I like Hello Stranger from 1963 even better. 

Barbara Mason, Yes I'm Ready.  From 1965.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outer Space

1960's psychedelia explored inner space, but there were a few songs from the '60s about outer space themes.  Telstar, an instrumental by the British band, The Tornados, 1962, was presumably in celebration of Telstar, the first communications satellite which also got high up in '62. (Telstar the song made it to the #1 slot on both the U. S. and British charts.)

Speaking of high, the Byrd's Eight Miles High, 1966,  tells of a trip into the outer or perhaps into the 'inner' or both.  I never paid much attention to the obscure lyrics.  The Coltranish riffs executed on a 12-string Rickenbacker were what got my attention.

Also by the Byrds, 1966, is the playful Mr. Spaceman.  And we can't omit Elton John, Rocket Man from 1972.

Off topic, but appropriate given current East Coast weather conditions: Good Night, Irene, 1950, the Weavers. 

Finally,  a tip of the hat this Saturday night to Victor Reppert who pointed me to this incredible oldies site.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Color

Here is a sampling, starting with the determinable and proceeding to some determinates:

Donovan and Joan Baez, Colors
Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses.  A beautiful song. Give it a chance.
Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses.  Never could understand why this tune is almost never played on the oldies stations.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze.  For all you benighted qualia deniers out there.
Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk
Jimi Hendrix, Red House
Cream, White Room.  You say this is not a song of color?  What, is white not a color?
Los Bravos, Black is Black
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
Joan Baez, The Green, Green Grass of Home

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse succumbed to the curse of 27 today.  Why is 27 such an auspicious age for a quick exit from life's freeway?  My guess is that at 27 one is still too young  fully to appreciate the ravages to the body of life in the fast lane  but is old enough to have done irreparable damage, so much so that just one more snort, one more shot, one more binge pushes the self-abuser over the edge.  So 27 is a sort of crossroads.

Here is Winehouse singing the great Gerry Goffin-Carole King song, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?  But there never was and never will be a cover superior to the Shirelle's 1961 version.  I've loved this song, in this version, ever since I first heard it in '61.  Carole King's version from her 1971 Tapestry album is also outstanding.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Psychedelia

How many of these do you remember?   If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason.  But among these five are three very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises
Love, Alone Again Or
Moby Grape, Omaha
H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship
Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Carpe Diem!

I quoted Jim Morrison on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his death: "The future's uncertain, and the end is always near." This morning I discovered that Rob Grill, lead singer of The Grassroots, has passed on.  Their first top ten hit, "Live forToday," made the charts in the fabulous and far-off Summer of Love (1967).  The lyrics are laden with the '60s Zeitgeist and express  something true and valuable that continues to resonate with many of us who were young in those days.

Here is a delightful clip in which none other than Jimmy Durante introduces the boys — "They don't have a manager, they have a gardener" — singing (or rather lip-syncing) their signature number. 

Carpe diem.  And while you're at it, carpe noctem.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Morrison

Tomorrow it will have been 40 years since Jim Morrison of the Doors broke on through to the other side expiring in a Paris bath tub.  A too intense celebration of the Dionysian can lead to a premature exit from life's freeway, as more than one 60's 'icon' discovered.  The year before saw the drug- and alcohol-fueled deaths of  both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Riders on the Storm, into this world we're thrown, brings a little Heidegger to the rock masses.

Roadhouse Blues:

Well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near.

Beer for breakfast is contraindicated and may hasten the end which is indeed near in any case.  Forty years on, the cult continues.  Supply your own critique and be careful who you choose as role model.