Category: Music

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66

Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed, Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)  Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? Now dig Bobby Troup.  And if that's too cool for you, here is Depeche Mode.  Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others have covered the tune.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 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 harmonic, 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 traveler, 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 with some beautiful images.

 

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Sorts of One-Hit Wonders

There are one-hit wonders whose hits have endured and one hit wonders whose hits have pretty much sunk into oblivion, which is why you need me to prowl the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for these moth-eaten memories.   Norma Tanega and her  Walkin' My Cat Named Dog belong to the latter category.  If you remember this curious tune from 1966  I'll buy you a beer.  An example of a one-hit wonder whose hit gets plenty of play is Curtis Lee's Pretty Little Angel Eyes.

Land of a Thousand Dances was Cannibal and the Head Hunters' one hit.  Its obscurity lies perhaps midway between the Tanega and Lee efforts.  This one goes out to my old friend Tom Coleman whose hometown is Whittier, California.  He most likely listened to this song some Saturday night while cruising Whittier Blvd, or else while enroute to a dance at the El Monte Stadium.  "Be there or be square."

Kerouac October Quotation #6: Slim Gaillard, the Man Who Knew Time

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. 

From On the Road:

 … one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above.  While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip.  Go, man, go!  (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

 

Sinatra on Rock and Roll

Frank Sinatra died on 14 May 1998. Here we read:

 . . . as Sinatra began to recover from Gardner, he became more outspoken. In 1957, he denounced rock 'n' roll as "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. … It manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth."

That is about as fair as my judgment, back in the '60s, of the music of Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack crooners: "lounge lizard music." Enamored as I was of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Sinatra's music struck me as so much booze-drenched escapist rubbish, devoid of reality content. Empty glamor and glitz, at home in the plastic fantastic fool's paradise called Las Vegas.

But escapism is what Sinatra and his generational cohort needed, as mine needed a music of engagement. Different generations with different needs and sensibilities. In the meantime, I've come to appreciate his artistry.

Angel Eyes.  Only the Lonely. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets.  So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie.  Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken.  I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky.  But I am not afraid to go.  Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away.  Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day.  It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge.  But no more strange  than the idea that  death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1970 Is That All There is?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Half Dozen Dedications

To Horace Jeffery Hodges who describes himself thusly:

I've gone from the Arkansas Ozarks through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel to South Korea. I've traveled to Mexico, Belgium, Holland, East Germany, England, France, Denmark, Austria, Czechoslovakia (before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Russia, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Scotland. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."

I've Been Everywhere.

To Peter Lupu, Forty Cups of Coffee and Smoke Smoke That Cigarette.

To Mike Valle, Ghost Riders in the Sky.

To Philoponus the Impecunious, Money.

To William the Nominalist, The Name Game.

To David Brightly, Heartaches by the Numbers.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mimi Fariña

Mimi Farina Let's not forget Joan Baez's sister, Mimi (1945-2001).  Interestingly, the girls' father is the noted physicist Albert Baez (1912-2007).  I remember a physics teacher in high school  showing us an instructional film made by one Albert Baez.  We were surprised to hear that he was Joan's father.  We hadn't heard of him, but we sure had heard of her.  This was around 1965.

Joan and Mimi sing a lovely version of Donovan's "Catch the Wind."  Speaking of Donovan, here he and Joan collaborate on another unforgettable 'sixties tune, "Colours."  Finally, Mimi, her husband Richard, and Pete Seeger in Pack Up Your Sorrows.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Carmelita, Juanita, and the Wicked Felina

Warren Zevon, Carmelita.  Linda Ronstadt's version.  Stay clear of heroin and Pioneer chicken, both.

Flying Burrito Brothers, Juanita. Lyrics:

'No  affection' were the words that stuck on my mind
When she walked out on me for the very last time.
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
I don't know what I've done to be treated this way.

In a cold dirty room that's where I found myself
With a bottle of wine and some pills off the shelf.
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
I don't know what I've done and I'm feeling so ashamed.

Then an angel appeared she was just 17
In a dirty old gown (town?) with a conscience so clean
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
She's brought back the life that I once threw away.

Delightfully ambiguous:  Is Juanita the girl who walked out or the one who saved him?  Or both?

Marty Robbins, El Paso.  "Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for/One little kiss and Felina, good-bye."