I've been up since 1:00 a.m. It is now 4:20 or so. This old man needs a second cup of java, and a musical re-boot. This goes out to all you young guys getting hammered these days. Awake yet? Now settle down and dig the Mose Allison version.
Category: Music
Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz
October already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself is such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of
Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology
Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker
Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth
Jack Kerouac, San Francisco
Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.
This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our bands Dudley Nightshade and Rosedale, who introduced me to Mose Allison and Herbie Hancock in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73. I heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Massachusetts with a girlfriend I dubbed 'Springtime Mary' which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.
Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues
Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues
Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk
Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Late September and Fare Thee Wells
Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."
Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September
The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly. We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame much of the stuff that came before and after. Or so we thought. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance. Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game.
Django Reinhardt, September Song
Walter Huston, September Song
Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac, Fare Thee Well
Mumford and the boys cover Dylan's "Farewell." Fabulous. Let it play on.
The Miracles, What's So Good about Good-Bye?
Woody Guthrie, So Long it's been Good to Know You
Peter, Paul, and Mary, Leaving on a Jet Plane
There’s a Moon Out Tonight
I caught a preview this morning at 5:15 from the mountain bike. A great caffeine-fueled ride from 5:15-6:43. It's cooling down in the Zone. Wore a shirt for a change. The strenuous life is best by test. It doesn't matter how old you are. Get out there and bust your hump for an hour or two every day. Brother Jackass will be glad you did. He'll be exploding with energy afterwards.
Supermoon tonight.
I first heard this when I was ten. This morning's moonset set it off one more once in the old man's head. "Without music, life would be a mistake." (Nietzsche). And it doesn't matter whether it's an old doo-wop number or The Ride of the Valkyries.
You may remember it from Apocalypse Now.
It might even be Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Friday the 13th Cat Blogging!
In the foothills of the Superstition Mountains! Friday cat blogging is an ancient and venerable tradition in the blogosphere. We pioneers of the 'sphere aim to keep it going. To hell with all you change-for-the-sake-of change 'progressives.'
I Ain't Superstitious, leastways no more than Howlin' Wolf, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path. All dressed up with nowhere to go. Nine lives and dressed to the nines.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition. Guitar solo starts at 3:03.
And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:
A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atomic scientist.
As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:
“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”
“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”
In Keeping with the Joyous Kamala Vibe . . .
. . . this old tune by the Beach Boys captures the sum and 'substance' of her campaign. Come Tuesday night, the surly scowls of the racist Trump will have no chance against Kamalita's vibrations and excitations.
And Kamala Baby would never, ever, bomb Iran.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, Moody
Bob Dylan, High Water. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton. Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter.
My favorite verse:
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.
Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.
Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere. Nice slide show.
The Band, Up on Cripple Creek
Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love. Waterfall. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.
Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide. I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s. She does a great job with this traditional song.
Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio. Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.
Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. Doc and family in a BBC clip.
Standells, Dirty Water. Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc. A great town to be young in. But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.
Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water. A beautiful song.
Henry Mancini, Moon River. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:
One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.
Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. Here is another version of the tune, from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with some beautiful images.
Doc Watson, Moody River. A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.
Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7." But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. (Now you know where the Electric Flag version came from.) Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna (With Latin and English). Better performance without lyrics.
Joan Baez, There But For Fortune. The best rendition of a song written by Phil Ochs. Watch the short video. Ochs' version.
I agree with this analysis of Ochs:
The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.
Joan Baez, A Simple Twist of Fate
Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust. Dylan wouldn't have made it without her.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Pattie Boyd as Muse
A musician needs a muse. George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd. Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired. If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment. Frank Sinatra famously said of George Harrison's "Something" that it "was the best love song ever written." He ought to know.
Layla (The best part starts at 3:13 the poignancy of which still rends my soul the way it did 54 years ago)
Bell Bottom Blues ("If I could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms . . . .")
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions
'Debby' is the name of that hurricane harassing Florida? Disasters should be named after disasters: 'Hillary,' 'Kamala,' 'Nancy,' 'Gretchen,' . . .
Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions. 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?
Cream, Sunshine of Your Love
Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report
Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.
Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.
Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
Allman Bros., Blue Sky
Kansas, Dust in the Wind
Eric Clapton, Let It Rain
Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now"). This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music? Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified!
Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?
Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.
Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night
Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow
Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain
Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.
Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:
"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart. [. . .]
Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]
Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.
Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."
Sunday Afternoon at the Oldies: Bluegrass
Here. HT: Ingvarius Maximus the Alhambran.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides
First a positive note: A Dylan biopic is coming, A Complete Unknown.
…………………………
Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)
Dalida, O Sole Mio. I think I'm in love. "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.[7][8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable… Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me… Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia)
The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963. "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]
Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years[8][9][10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.[11][12] In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)
Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune. "Philip David Ochs (/ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an American protest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.[110]" (Wikipedia)
My favorite suicide song is Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits. James Taylor offers a beautiful interpretation. Is it really about suicide at sea? The reference to Martin Eden suggests to me that it is. But you might reasonably disagree.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Freedom and Liberty
Metallica, Don't Tread on Me
Rascals, People Got to Be Free
Tom Petty, I Won't Back Down
Johnny Cash, I Won't Back Down
Merle Haggard, The Fightin' Side of Me
The Who, Going Mobile
Richie Havens, Freedom
Cream, I Feel Free
The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans
Highwaymen, City of New Orleans
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some ‘Song’ Songs
Mose Allison, The Song is Ended
Punch Bros., Dink's Song
Dave van Ronk, Dink's Song
Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song
Fairport Convention, Percy's Song
Doors, Alabama Song
Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with his Song
Bob Dylan, Song to Woody
Chad and Jeremy, Summer Song
Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song
Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song
Rupert Holmes, The Pina Colada Song
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Gone but not Forgotten
As a sort of intro, The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old." My English readers will enjoy the video.
Charlie Watts at 80, 1941-2021. Rolling Stones, Sittin' on a Fence. A lovely tune. Trigger warning! Under My Thumb. Eerily appropriate these days: Gimme Shelter
Don Everly at 84, 1937-2021. When Will I Be Loved?
Check out this Fogerty rendition. Great video. The myths of the American West. Bob Dylan, Ain't Talkin': Tribute to the Western.
Nanci Griffith at 68, 1953-2021. Boots of Spanish Leather. Bob would be proud.
B. J. Thomas at 78, 1942-2021. I Just Can't Help Believing
Lloyd Price at 88, 1933-2021. Stagger Lee. Personality
Chick Corea at 79, 1941-2021. Armando's Rhumba
Mary Wilson at 76, 1944-2021. Our Day Will Come
Amy Winehouse at 26, 1983-2011, Our Day Will Come, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? A member of the 27 Club.
Jimmie Rodgers at 87. 1933-2021. Honeycomb
Phil Spector at 81, 1939-2021. The Wall of Sound
Charley Pride at 82, 1938-2021.
Len Barry at 78, 1942-2020. You Can't Sit Down
Jerry Jeff Walker at 78, 1942-2020. Mr. Bojangles
Spencer Davis at 81, 1939-2020. Gimme Some Lovin'