Ray Barretto, El Watusi, 1963. I remember when it first came out, but you young whippersnappers may remember it from Carlito's Way. Don't ask me what it means. The Orlons, Wah-Watusi, 1962.
Category: Music
Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Baker’s Dozen Road Songs Plus One
Entangled deep in the psyche of every true American is a deep love of the open road. Here are some tunes to be enjoyed while seated at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, while 'motorvatin' over some lonesome desert highway in the magic west of buttes and mesas, with four on the road, one in the hand, and the other wrapped around a fine cigar or a cup of steaming java.
Woody Guthrie, Hard Travelin'. Hank Williams, Lost Highway. Spade Cooley, Detour. Leonard Cohen, Passing Through. Bob Dylan, Highway 51 Blues. Robert Johnson, Crossroad Blues. Eric Clapton, Crossroads. Nelson Riddle, Route 66. Chuck Berry, Get Your Kicks on Route 66. Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere. The Doors, Roadhouse Blues. Johnny Cash, Highway 61 Revisited. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited.
Steve Allen and Jack Kerouac, A reading from On the Road.
Saturday Night at the Oldies II: Three Suicide Songs
You're getting a double dose this Saturday, muchachos — to make up for last Saturday. These go out to S.S. Slim. We begin on a humorous note with James Darren's hit from 1961, Goodbye Cruel World. And then to a rather more somber number of the same name by Pink Floyd. But neither can hold a candle to Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers.
Leavin' my family, I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
Tears are salt water and the moon's full and high
And I know Martin Eden is gonna be proud of me
Many before me who've been called by the sea
To be up in the crow's nest and singin' my say
And shiver me timbers I'm a-sailin' away
The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone
And please call my missus and tell her not to cry
My goodbye is written by the moon in the sky
And nobody knows me, I can't fathom my stayin'
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away
The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone
And I'm leavin' my family, and I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Magic ’60s
I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Running on St. Valentine’s Day
My training over and my carbo-loading done, I am now in the psych-up phase for tomorrow's Lost Dutchman marathon. Will I be able to go the distance? At the outset, I'll Take It Easy but then Take It to the Limit. I will have no trouble with the first 20 miles, but the last 10 K I will be Running on Empty. Question is whether I will be Willin' to keep on movin'?
And while we're on the running them, let's not forget Del Shannon's Runaway, Roy Orbison's Running Scared, and Dion DiMucci's Runaround Sue. And then there's that Crystals number the refrain of which sounds like 'They do run, run.'
And tomorrow being St Valentine's Day, three for my wife. An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: It’s Not All Sex and Drugs
Here are my six favorite broadly religious songs in the rock/pop genre. Clapton & Winwood, In the Presence of the Lord. And now three by the 'philosophical' Beatle. (If Ringo Starr is the 'regular guy' Beatle, and Paul McCartney the 'romantic' Beatle, and John Lennon the 'radical' Beatle, then George Harrison is the 'philosophical/religious' Beatle. My Sweet Lord. All Things Must Pass. Give Me Love.
And now two by the protean Bob Dylan. Father of Night. Gotta Serve Somebody.
Finally, two powerful anti-drug songs. Hoyt Axton, The Pusher. Steppenwolf version from "Easy Rider." Buffy Sainte- Marie, Codeine.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Sunny’ Songs
Last time the theme was 'rainy' songs. To balance things out, here are some 'sunny' songs. Donovan, To Try For the Sun. Forgot what a great tune that is. Might have been the mid-60's since I last heard it. And then there's the moody Sunny Goodge Street by the same artist. The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun.
Jimi Hendrix, Third Stone From the Sun from his first album. A bit of psychedelia from '67. It's good to see that Mose Allison is still at it, at age 83. Here is his quirky verson of "You Are My Sunshine." I used to catch Mose at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, at the end of the '60s. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan try to do a duet of the same song. If you can't stomach either of those versions, there is always Doris Day.
Cream, Sunshine of Your Love. Bobby Hebb, Sunny (1966). I had to reach my long arm far back into the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for this Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee version of the old standard, The Sunny Side of the Street (1941).
Finally, The Sun Also Rises, a tune that I heard in 1968 and have had in my head for four decades but haven't heard again until just now. For the last 42 years I have been trying without success to remember the name of the band and locate the tune. 'Fever Tree' it is, an obscure group that I heard together with Canned Heat at an L.A. club in '68. If you remember them, I'll buy you a beer.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Rain Theme
Here in the Zone and elsewhere in the West we are getting a much-needed soaking. And that puts me in mind of my favorite rain songs.
Fire and Rain is particularly appropriate for California: first the wildfires strip the land of vegetation, then the rains come and bring on mudslides. Didn't James Taylor have an album called Mudslide Slim?
Dee Clark, Raindrops. Cascades, Rythm of the Rain (1963).
The Beatles' Rain 'blew my mind' back in '66.
And of course there is the lovely Gordon Lightfoot composition, Early Morning Rain, here performed in 1966 by PP&M. Dylan's version is also very nice.
Speaking of America's troubadour, we cannot omit his Hard Rain, written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dylan was a great writer of topical songs because he knew how to make them poetic and not too obvious.
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35? Dylan's worst song. Doesn't deserve a link. But his "Buckets of Rain" (from Blood on the Tracks) is another story. Here is Maria Muldaur's version. Remember her? And Dave van Ronk's.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Woman as Devil Theme
The question is posed in this 1955 Clovers number. But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover. Elvis Presley learns that appearances can deceive. Marty Robbins succumbs to temptation and begs his Mary for forgiveness. An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.
How Bob Dylan Got Unpoliticized
The story is told in My Back Pages. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
How Joan Baez Got Politicized
David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147:
Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With God on Our Side." By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi. She was startled by the music she heard and fascinated with the fact that the enigma in the filthy jeans had created it. "When I heard him sing 'With God on Our Side,' I took him seriously," said Joan. "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad. It was devastating. 'With God on Our Side' is a very mature song. It's a beautiful song. When I hear that, it changed the way I thought of Bob. I realize that he was more mature than I thought. He even looked a little better." Social consciousness as an aphrodisiac? [. . .]
Dylan played a few more of his topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Masters of War." They astounded Spoelstra, who had not kept up with his old Village cohort's development as a songwriter, and they seemed to overwhelm Baez. (In one interview, Baez recalled "The Death of Emmett Till," not "With God on Our Side," as the Dylan song that changed her view of him and prompted her to take up protest music; "I was basically a traditional folksinger," she said. "I was not 'political' at that time. When I heard 'Emmett Till' I was knocked out. It was my first political song. That song turned me into a political folksinger."
Saturday Night at the Oldies: There But For Fortune
Tonight's episode is in memory of my grade school classmate Vincent Regan who languishes in prison for his part in a brutal rape and murder. He belongs in prison for the rest of his life, and I don't believe that "there but for fortune go you or I." But fortune, genetics, and environment have some imponderable roles to play in our behavior. Thus the liberal point of view represented in tonight's selection deserves consideration.
Phil Ochs (1940-1976) was a major player in the '60s folk scene who died by his own hand in 1976. Nowadays he is perhaps best remembered as the author of "There But For Fortune." The haunting beauty of the song comes out best in this Joan Baez rendition. Here is a live clip of Ochs singing his song in 1967 at The Bitter End.
Show me the prison, show me the jail
Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale
And I'll show you young land with so many reasons why
That there but for fortune, go you or I
Show me the alley, show me the train
Show me the hobo who sleeps out in the rain
And I'll show you young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I — you or I.
Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me the drunkard as he stumbles out the door
And I'll show you young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I — you or I.
Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you young land with so many reasons why
That there but for fortune, go you and I – you and I.
What’s Wrong with Kitsch and Sentimentality?
April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of Deep Purple became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.
Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Adorno would not approve.
There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it. Who has time? No job, no kids, no social entanglements — and still no time.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Christmas Tunes
Elvis Presley and Martina McBride, Blue Christmas. And can we call it Christmas until we've heard Porky Pig's version at least once? Or Cheech and Chong's Santa Claus and His Old Lady? Must Be Santa but can it be Dylan? Santa Claus is Coming to Town by the best of the YouTube amateurs, the amazing Fretkillr. Leon Redbone and Dr. John's Frosty the Snowman.
Remembering John Lennon
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, but this tune of his from the 1965 Rubber Soul album is a gem, and more than fit to remember him by.