Category: Music

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mary Travers

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Mary Travers of the popular 1960's folk trio "Peter, Paul and Mary" passed away on Wednesday, from leukemia, at age 72.  Travers and Co. did perhaps as much as anyone to popularize the songs of the young Bob Dylan.  The best known of them is 'Blowin' in the Wind," which became an anthem of the civil rights movement. 

Here it is in a 1966 live performance.

Unlike Travers and Joan Baez, who knew how to make Dylan's songs sound beautiful — as witness this version of "Farewell Angelina" — Dylan soon distanced himself from the politics of the Left as he 'explains' in "My Back Pages" an electrified and electrifying version of which is here. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

It would be a mistake to think that the Left owns Dylan.  The case for Dylan as conservative is argued at RightWingBob.com.

Though the news accounts don't mention it, Mary Travers was a red diaper baby.  Here is another red diaper baby, David Horowitz, on Travers and her fellow travelers:

At a Freedom Forum conference on 1968, Life magazine editor and former Sixties activist Robert Friedman claimed that most student protestors were not simply trying to avoid the draft (a thesis I have elsewhere maintained), but were "motivated by something beyond that was weighing on us." Folksinger (and former Sixties activist) Mary Travers explained the "something" as idealism. Then she said this:

"I think sometimes that that was the last generation who believed in the American dream and its myths. These kids had gotten involved in the civil-rights movement and they were on the side of the angels, they were going to make America the country that it’s always said it was."

Referring to oneself in the third person is a characteristic evasion, but it is only the beginning of the bullshit. Come off it Mary. Your diapers were red. Your father was a hack novelist for the Communist Party, USA. When other kids were going to Frank Sinatra concerts you were headed for the Party’s annual May Day parade to march against the Wall Street war-mongers and to show your solidarity with the peace-loving commissars of the Soviet police state and their beneficent leader Joe Stalin. In the Sixties, you didn’t believe in the American dream. You lusted after the vision of a Communist utopia, mid-wived by armies of bearded guerrillas or carried on the wings of a MIG-21. Why all the liberal fol-de-rol? Why can’t you just tell it like it was?

Although the music of the 1960's was great, the idealism was much of it tainted and misdirected.  Some sober reflection on what really 'went down' during those heady years is a salutary counterbalance to the misty-eyed nostalgia we '60s veterans are wont to indulge in as our heroes fall one by one into oblivion.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock Salt and Nails

The best version of this haunting Utah Phillips song is the one by Joan Baez. But it has been removed from YouTube.  Here is Rosalie Sorrel's version.  And here is Dylan's.

If your ladies was blackbirds/And your ladies was thrushes/I'd lie there for hours/In the  chilly cold marshes/If your ladies was squirrels, with high bushy tails/I'd load up my shotgun with rock salt and nails.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September in the Rain

In the Sonoran desert, September is still seriously summer.  But today's monsoon rains brought with them a merciful cool-down which put me in mind of this old standard written by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics) and first published in 1937.  It has been covered by everyone from the Beatles to Slim Gaillard, from Jo Stafford to Cilla Black.  For my money, however, the best version is Dinah Washington's (1961).  Sarah Vaughn's jazzily understated version dates from 1957.  And while we have Miss Vaughn in mind, here is her 1959 "Broken Hearted Melody."

The Ne Plus Ultra of Music

For me, it doesn't get any better than the late piano sonatas of Beethoven, especially Op. 109, 110, 111. This is music preeminent and unsurpassable, though some of Brahms comes close. Here is Claudio Arrau performing the First Movement of Sonata 32, Opus 111.

I am a musical elitist, but not a snob. An elitist in that I maintain that such popular genres as blues, jazz, folk, rock, and so on are not music in the eminent sense: they do not speak to what is highest and best in us. Or at least not in their typical manifestations.  I admit that there are some exceptions.  Example.  But there is nothing wrong with popular music's being geared to our lower self.   The claims of the lower self have their limited validity. Not a snob, in that I enjoy and appreciate music of all kinds, with only a few exceptions.

To say that the best of the blues is the equal of the best of Beethoven is a bit like saying that the best of Carnap is equal to the best of Plato. Either you see what is wrong with that or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you. Here we enter the realm of the unarguable. Positivism is to philosophy as muzak is to music.   Positivism is to Platonism as blues to Beethoven.

Does the Left Own Dylan?

Not according to Sean Curnyn of RightWingBob.com.  (Via Paul J. Cella) 

Dylan is an artist not an ideologue, arguably America's greatest troubadour.  For a taste of Left-Right polarity in Dylan's work already in the 1960s compare Subterranean Homesick Blues with Father of Night.  The Weatherman faction of the SDS got its name from the line, "It don't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" from the former.  It is worth noting that Dylan's farewell to ideology came early, in 1964, in My Back Pages, thus a year before "Subterranean Homesick Blues."  If you can't stand Dylan's voice, give a listen to this high-powered version of "My Back Pages" featuring Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young, et al.

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Dream Theme

In the late '50s the sexual revolution was right around the corner, but hadn't yet arrived.  So those late '50s dudes did more dreaming than doing.  The dream theme is well explored in these 'classics':  Dream Lover (Bobby Darin, 1959), Dreamin' (Johnny Burnett, 1960), In Dreams (Roy Orbison), In Dreams (Orbison, live version), All I Have to Do is Dream (Everly Brothers, 1959).

Sentimentality and schmaltz, you complain?  I won't deny it, but surely it is to be preferred to the crudity and soullessness and outright malevolence of much of what came later.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Peter and Gordon

Peter gordon The Grim Reaper, the ultimate Repo Man, is certainly no slacker.  In recent days he has paid a visit to  Karl Malden, Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays (America's Pitchman), Walter Cronkite, and today I heard of the passing of Gordon Waller, 64,  of Peter and Gordon fame.  P & G were major players in the 1964 'British Invasion.'  Here is a hit to remember Gordon by.  From 1965.

And here's another.  And another. 


Death is near my friends, right around the corner.  It doesn't take much to send you packing into Kingdom Come: a little food gone down the wrong way, a texting moron of a motorist, a bit of errant plaque lodged in a cerebral artery. . . . So work out your salvation with diligence while the sun shines.  You're burning daylight while hanging by a thread.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Reason’ Titles

We need a list of 'Reason' titles.  Here are three: You're the Reason I'm Livin; You're the Reason (I Don't Sleep at Night); Reason to Believe.  Last week or so I've been forcing myself to listen to Michael Jackson stuff to see if maybe, just maybe, I may have missed something of merit.  But it's just robotic crap compared to tunes of human meaning like these that can give a man pleasure from 8 to 80.  I can't imagine anyone but a freak relating to Jackson's "Bad" at the age of 80 even if he could relate to it at 8 or 18.

Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.