Leiber & Stoller

Jerry Leiber, with his songwriting partner, Mike Stoller, helped create rock 'n' roll music in America. It soon spread to the rest of the world. When the duo teamed up in 1950 it was with the idea to write for black rhythm and blues artists.

Since then their hit songs have been everywhere. I think of three great songwriting teams of the Twentieth Century: George and Ira Gershwin, Lennon and McCartney, and Leiber and Stoller. There were more, but I believe those three had the greatest influence on popular music.

Jerry Leiber died August 20, 2011.

It wouldn't be possible for me to show a YouTube video of every Leiber and Stoller hit song that I like. I found some versions of the songs that I think are interesting, to demonstrate how talented and versatile they were.

My standard disclaimer: sometimes YouTube breaks the links on a video because of copyright issues. If you're looking at this blog and one or more links are black that's the reason.











Jerry Leiber wrote “Spanish Harlem” with Phil Spector.



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Sons of Tony Sopranarchy

Stories about criminals are always popular. Movies like The Godfather, Parts 1 and 2, both of which are considered two of the best American movies ever made, are still popular after forty years.

Television broke ground when HBO ran The Sopranos, another Mafia saga, set in current times. Tony Soprano and his gang were a bunch of ruthless criminals and killers and the audience loved them. There's an anarchic part of us which likes to see the bad guys win. The Godfather, Don Corleone, gave birth to Tony Soprano, who gave birth to a genre of cable television shows. They aren't subject to network standards and practices, so they can push the edge.

Trading on that, cable networks AMC has a top hit, Breaking Bad, and FX has the biker series, Sons of Anarchy.

Breaking Bad is still one of the best series on television, if only for the terrific performances of its two main leads, Bryan Cranston as former high school chemistry teacher, Walt White, and his partner-in-crime, Jesse Pinkston, played by Aaron Paul. At the beginning of Season One we feel sorry for Walt, who is diagnosed with lung cancer. He's terminal, but uses his skills as a chemist to make a superior brand of methamphetamine to insure his family's financial security. He enlists the aid of a former student, the druggie Jesse, to help him sell his product. From there Walt and Jesse's lives have spiraled out of control. Their roles are changing. Walt's cancer is in remission, but he is showing an antisocial side to his personality, more ruthless. Jesse has shown he has a conscience. Both men have killed, but while Walt doesn't seem bothered by murder, Jesse does.

I can't think of worse people than murderous drug dealers, and yet I'm in front of my television every week rooting for them to get away with it.

I don't know any drug dealers in real life, but during the 1970s I worked with quite a few bikers. Sons of Anarchy shows their culture as accurately as I remember. Bikers are cliquish, can work with people outside of their society, but the club is the most important thing. In that way it's no different than street gangs who band together and become wolf packs of violence and criminality.

Ron Perlman (Hellboy, and Vincent from Beauty and the Beast) is Clay Morrow, president and co-founder of the club. The club is referred to as SAMCRO, an acronym for Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Originals.

Clay's wife, Gemma, is played by Katey Sagal, who starred as Peggy Bundy for years in the comedy series, Married With Children. Charlie Hunnam, an actor I was not familiar with before the series, is the lead character, Jax, who is Gemma's son, and Clay's stepson.

SAMCRO is a gun-running group who operate out of a small Northern California town, the fictional Charming (great name, there). They are in league with the chief of police to keep other elements out of the town. It doesn't make them noble, just protective of their turf. Naturally their activities have raised the interest of law enforcement, specifically the ATF (Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms), a law enforcement arm of the United States government, and an agent, June Stahl, played by Ally Walker.

Since this is television, there are fantasy elements that come into the stories...like law enforcement being so dumb they can't seem to pin the most obvious crimes on the characters. I watched the first two seasons of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix streaming video, and shook my head with disbelief that this gang could get away with so much in plain sight. The capper to me came when one of the bikers threatened Agent Stahl with a gun and he wasn't arrested. The United States government is a lot more powerful than any biker gang in a hick town. We're left with a sense of disbelief at what they get away with.

At least Breaking Bad gives us some semblance of realism. In that series Dean Norris plays Walt White's brother-in-law, Hank, who is an agent of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), sniffing around Walt's boss, the enigmatic Gustavo Fring. Gus is played to dead-panned perfection by Giancarlo Esposito. Gus owns a restaurant chain, Los Pollos Hermanos, the cover for his major drug operation.

(I last wrote a post about this series in June, 2010.)

Just as Sons of Anarchy goes out of its way to make me doubt its credibility, so occasionally does Breaking Bad. I'm giving the latter series a little slack because the whole fourth season hasn't played out yet, but I'm wondering how it is that two trucks, with the name Los Pollos Hermanos painted on the sides, can be shot up by a rival drug cartel, drivers and drug couriers killed, and not have the interest of the FBI and DEA as to why. Maybe that subject will come up again later.

It's a weakness of shows using criminals as heroes that the plots have to go to great lengths to keep the characters from ending up behind bars. In real life there have been major criminals who have operated with impunity, but it's usually because of corrupt officials. Sooner or later illegal activities come out in the open. Maybe it's just because I'm a natural born paranoid, but if I were one of the characters in these dramas I'd be doing a lot of looking over my shoulder. I'd be wondering when a van full of SWAT team members, DEA, FBI, or ATF, were about to swoop down on me. Because we care about the characters in these TV series we forget that real-life criminals are sociopaths with targets on their backs. At some point the law will break down their doors. Federal prisons are grim places, where crooks do hard time, and lots of it. That's something that isn't shown in any of these programs, but it's something the fans should think about. I like Jesse, Walt, and those bad boy bikers of SAMCRO, but they're all gonna be cooling their heels for about 50 years in a federal facility, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

************

I was there for the first episode of The Sopranos on HBO, and I was hooked as soon as I heard this theme song. The two series I wrote about above have good theme music, but for sheer brilliance it's hard to top this classic opener:




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Sin, you swingers! Or, the swap meat

Forty years ago my friend, appropriately named Dick, used to buy a quarterly swinger directory, filled with ads for couples looking to have sex with other couples.

Both Dick and I were married guys. The idea of having sex with strange women titillated Dick. He was always excited when he'd find a listing for a swinger in our hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. I made fun of his fascination, and he never told me whether he contacted anyone from the directory.

For being capitol city of one of the most conservative states in America, Salt Lake can surprise. As I've found out in recent years, there are local swingers communities within Utah's religious, conservative culture, something that doesn't fit into the popular notion of what people in Utah are capable of. There's a stereotype of Utah residents both outside and inside Utah. Even we longtime residents often judge fellow Utahns as a righteous and right-wing group of citizens. It's a perception that is more myth than reality, but perhaps that image helps to create a swinger subculture. If you're a swinger, you're putting one over on the religious types surrounding you.

An article in the December 24, 2008 issue of the Salt Lake City Weekly by Stephen Dark had the story of some local swingers who, in a perversely humorous way, perform swinging as a religion:

Welcome to a nighttime service at Eden church. If the trampoline is an altar, then the oral sex taking place on it is about as close to an act of devotion as this particular religious institution favors. Eden is a church unique in Utah—if not in the United States. It is a hedonistic order dedicated to those who like to trade their spouses for sex—better known as swinging. Adult couples gather in this 2,800-square-foot building to swap conversation, partners and bodily fluids, all under the grandmotherly eye of their pastor, Cindy, and her husband Vaughn, who requested their last name be withheld.

Cindy and Vaughn, 50 and 53 respectively, have been married for 33 years. Despite the reputation for promiscuity swingers have, Vaughn says, there are fewer notches on their bedpost than you might expect. “We’ve had sex with 30 or so couples” over the past two and a half decades, he says. Cindy is a stalwart of the local sex industry. She owned a lingerie boutique in South Salt Lake from 1989 to 1999. She grew so frustrated over battles with law enforcement over displaying sex toys, she decided in 1990 to up the ante: She started a magazine for swingers wanting to advertise for other couples called Talk and Play, which closed in 2000.

Like most hobbyists, people who swing need a place to gather. But the last thing Cindy wants, she says, is other couples leaving “their DNA” all over her home furniture. She decided to open a place where swingers could get to know one another without worrying about the prejudices of “vanilla people.” (That’s what swingers call those who don’t share their sexual predilections.) A place where—with apologies to the 1980s sitcom Cheers—everyone knows far more than just your name. Such a venue would have required Cindy to secure a sexually orientated business license. That would have exposed her and fellow swingers to possible scrutiny by the state. She was ordained a high priestess by the online Universal Life Church in April 2001. So sanctioned by Universal Life, Cindy opened a sanctuary for her fellow swingers in the shape of Eden’s hedonistic religious order. Universal Life’s only requirement, Cindy says, “is we do the right thing.”

Salt Lake's television station KSL, on an edition of its Eyewitness News, showed a story in 2006 by reporter Debbie Dujanovic about local swingers and attitudes of what is called "the lifestyle":

Vicky Burgess/Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist: "I think, because sexual relations and sex itself is more open, I think we're seeing more of it."

We found there are several parties where couples can meet. Randy Chatelain, Ph.D./ Marriage and Family Therapist: "I believe this kind of behavior is going to catch up with a couple, because where does it stop? What more do you have to involve to create the high?"

Hundreds of [swinging] couples pack a popular Sandy [Salt Lake suburb] nightclub.

"A lot of people nowadays have fantasies and they want to fulfill them with their significant other. This is the best way to do that." This man, who asked not to be identified, built a business, helping couples meet at parties. His website suggests spouses can be in love and still enjoy sex with others. "They figure, 'I would much rather do it with the person I love than have them do it behind my back.'"

From the looks of it, he's pretty successful. He has 4,000 members living in Utah. How fast is it growing? Four years ago there were 150 members. How common is it? Posing as a married woman, we signed up on a website aimed at so-called "swingers." In six days, 70 married men, most from Utah, ask to start a fling.

In 2005 I was shocked to find out a female coworker and her husband were swingers. She was very careful about who she approached, but she would approach a man, asking if he and his wife would like to join her and her husband. Her husband, whom I never met, was a puppeteer, pulling her strings. The man his wife was luring was less important than that man's wife was to the puppeteer. The puppeteer's wife was the bait, the other man's wife was the real catch. In all the years I'd known her my impression was that she and her husband were pillars of their church, who attended Sunday services regularly and lived a religious lifestyle.

Years ago I heard about another male coworker, who with his wife, would meet other couples at a local pancake restaurant, where they'd throw their car keys on the table. The keys they picked up belonged to the couple they'd be swinging with that night. I tried to imagine myself in that situation and couldn't. I tried to imagine that guy, who was fat and ugly, being a swinger, and I couldn't picture that either.

Considering for how many years I'd been fooled by my coworker, the swinger wife who with her husband posed as a church-going religious couple on Sunday after a Saturday night spent boffing other couples, or the fat, ugly guy swinging every weekend, maybe a lot of other people I know in Utah would surprise me, also.



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"We" are not pregnant

From today's newspaper comes this: Levi Johnston writes in his book that Bristol Palin was so angry about her mother's pregnancy with son Trig that she wanted to get pregnant, too. He says she told him in 2008, "let's get pregnant." Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs, comes out Sept. 20."

Of all the affectations of modern speech, for me the worst is "we are pregnant."

No, I'm not against pregnancy, and was happy when I heard it from the lips of my own dear wife 35 years ago. But there was no "we" in that pregnancy. We went through a lot together during that pregnancy, and it ended with a C-section to save the lives of her and our son. I stood hopelessly back at the time, because she was the one who was pregnant, not me.

Yes, I understand that "we are pregnant" means it is a shared experience between partners, that both go through many of the same things during that time. But I still hate it as a figure of speech. As for being pregnant, there is no "we," just thee, not me.

Was Bruce Willis pregnant when his wife was? I think not.

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"...like something from another universe."

Tea party members don't need to do any original thinking. They just repeat what they hear on right-wing talk radio, joining the like-minded in mindless parroting.

A friend sent me an anti-Obama e-mail he got from an acquaintance of his. I edited by cutting off the last two paragraphs, but left the rest as I received it, spelling, grammar and all.

HE DOES NOT HAVE A CLUES ABOUT HOW TO RUN ANYTHING.

THE GOVERNMENT HAS NO WAY TO MAKE MONEY EXCEPT TO TAKE THE FREE MAN'S MONEY AND GIVE IT THE POOR BASTARD'S THAT DO NOT WANTTP WORK FOR IT. THE ILLEGAL SPAINIARDS ARE GETIONG INCOME TAX REFUNDS. THIS ABSOLUTE BULL####!THIS BASTAD HAS TO BE ELECTED TO LEAVE THE WHITE HOUSE.HE IS AN ABSOLUTE FRAUD FROM DAY ONE. IF ANY WISE 25-6MAN OR WOMWN CASTS A VOTE OR O'BUMMER AGAIN. I HOPE THE GET WHAT IS COMING.HE SIMPLY HAS TO GO!!

DEMOCRATS PLAY BY JIMMY HOFFA'S DAD'S RULES AND THAT IS PRE-HISTORICALLY WRONG.THESE 'FRAIDY ASS REPUB'S NEED TO GET OF OFF THER ASSES AND GET SOME S### GOING

PIERRE

Obama’s enemies are blaming him for problems that were entrenched before he ever took the oath of office, like a major crash of the U.S. economy and unemployment. We don’t live in Harry Potter’s world, so no one can wave a magic wand and cure those problems. Tea party hatred for Obama clouds their thinking, dulls their minds, and keeps them from working toward real solutions. Their only goal is to get Obama out in 2012.

You don't have to know what's going on to get along. As a matter of fact, ignorance and misstatements of fact are endearing to the Bachmann and Palin fans. It means they're "real folks," as dense as the people who love them.

A problem of perception of Obama by these brain-fogged folks is that he comes across as cerebral, an intellectual. I see him as thinking through a problem. The intellectual tag sticks to Obama, and that sticks in the throats of people like Pierre. They like a man like G.W. Bush, who sounds like a Wild West sheriff: less thought, more direct action. Bush’s place is being taken by his successor as Texas governor, Rick Perry, another shoot-from-the-hip politician. Yeee-haw!

Twenty-first Century men with Nineteenth Century ideas.

It must really gall racists to have this “uppity black man” in the White House, making sense while their tea party and Republican representatives are acting out like spoiled children.

No wonder Obama has called these politics a circus.

The latest poll figures I heard were that Obama had an approval rating of 46%, which is bad, but the United States Congress has an approval rating of 12%. Twelve percent!! Yet they persist in their negative, disruptive, hardball tactics which serve no purpose except to make themselves look bad. They’d rather do that than admit they are wrong. It is a very nasty era of American politics, as down and ugly as we’ve seen it in the past 40 years or more, with ugliness and prejudice fueled by the money of right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and others.

From Put A Lid On It by Donald Westlake.

[A political character has been undercover as a chauffeur for a millionaire right-winger, and makes a comment]:

"I just found the fellow fascinating."

Bob stopped his inspection to glare at Jeffords. "You did what!?"

"To watch a mind like that at work," Jeffords said, and shook his head in admiration. "He processes the same information from the world that you and I do, and turns it into something from another universe. It's like listening to someone from the Flat Earth Society, or those people who believe the moon landings were faked on soundstages in Hollywood."

. . . "I admire the effect," Jeffords said. If I could tap into the subtext of fears and prejudices and prides and misunderstood history the way he can, only with a little more self-awareness, bring it out a little smoother, a little blander . . . I'd be running for president myself."

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Muggs with mugshots

An article in my local morning newspaper described a dilemma some people find themselves in after being arrested by the police. Their arrest mugshots are shown on various commercial websites. In order to get their picture removed from the website they have to contact another website where, for $399, they can get their mugshot taken off the site. It would obviously behoove anyone in such a situation not to want a prospective employer to google his name, and find him pop up on a mugshot website. So some pay the price. The article goes on to say that some arrestees feel this is a form of extortion. Since the mugshots are part of the public record there is nothing that police agencies can do about the practice except advise, "Don't get arrested."


I agree. But on the other hand I can look at their pictures and think, "Thank god that isn't me!" It has been one of the main goals of my life to never come within whistling distance of a jail, much less a booking picture.

The charges against these individuals are pretty common and boring. They include domestic violence, drugs, DUI. I can make up better charges in my head, just by looking at the those arrested.

For instance, I'd list the charge against these two as BEING STUPEFIED.




For these youngsters I'd throw in a charge of MISTAKENLY THINKING THIS IS A YEARBOOK PICTURE.



There could be a couple of crimes these guys could be charged with, so take your choice: BEING OLD HIPPIES, or LOOKING LIKE DRUG-ADDLED '80S HEAVY METAL SURVIVORS.



Along those lines, these next individuals will definitely go to jail for HAVING A REALLY BAD HAIR DAY.





How about HAVING A REALLY BAD HAIR DAY with an additional charge of SLEEPING THROUGH ARREST AND BOOKING . . .


. . .or ARRESTED, BUT LOOKING GOOD.


This prisoner is being charged with DELIBERATELY RAMMING FACE INTO TOE OF POLICE OFFICER'S BOOT MULTIPLE TIMES.


And finally, this man has been charged with IMPERSONATING A CARTOON CHARACTER.


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Clean dirty music

If you're like me you've gotten blasé about sexually explicit music. There has always been music about sex, but it was more innuendo, without using obscene language to describe the sex act. "Race records" were aimed at black people, and a lot of the music was thinly, yet cleverly, disguised. How else to listen to songs called "I Want To Bang Your Box" (box being a piano, heh-heh) by the Toppers, or "Big Ten Inch" (a 10" 33 1/3 rpm record, wink-wink) by Bullmoose Jackson? It's clear what they're really about, but like the other songs in this list, they use clean language to make a dirty song.

Or at least it was dirty way back when. Frank Zappa said, "Parents saw a danger in that lewd black music," to describe the alarm of the mid-1950s about rock music. African-Americans had evolved a coded language for sex in music. We've come a long way in 60 years, but I'm not sure it's for the better. These songs still titillate, and I still laugh at Hank Ballard and the Midnighters' "Work With Me Annie." The Etta James answer song, "Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry"), was cleaned up for white audiences of the 1950s by substituting one word, "dance" for "roll" to change its blatant sexuality into a benign, catchy tune that was a big crossover hit.

That happened more than once in that era. Squeaky-clean Pat Boone covering Little Richard is a good example. Luckily history has chosen the best version of the song for us, as it has chosen Etta James' raunchier version of "Roll With Me Henry" as preferable to its mainstream counterpart.

My Disclaimer: YouTube has been known to remove videos and break the links. If you encounter a black screen it's their fault and not mine.






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Happy birthday, Van Morrison

Van Morrison is 66 today. Happy birthday, Van!

I don't know anyone who can write a love song like Van.





What a great line-up for this 1977 Midnight Special appearance with Elvin Bishop and Mickey Hart.



That is, unless you can get Ray Charles to do some of your backup singing.



Morrison's introduction was in the band, Them. "Gloria"--next to "Louie Louie"--might be the song most covered by '60s garage bands everywhere.



The first song I heard from Them was "Here Comes the Night" and here the band is singing it live in '65. Van screws it up at the first, but recovers quickly and despite using a prehistoric sound system they manage to carry it off.



If you encounter a black screen on any of these videos it's YouTube's doing. They sometimes break the links for copyright reasons, so enjoy them while they're here.

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W. C. Fields was a gift

I’m still going through online issues of Life magazine from the post-War era, the period into which we Baby Boomers were born.

W. C. Fields died almost 65 years ago, on Christmas Day, 1946. This movie, It’s A Gift, from 1934, is 77 years old, still very funny. Do kids today appreciate Fields’ humor? They should, but my impression is that kids today have a whole other sense of humor, one based on how outrageous and gross the comic can get.




The advantage of many old-time comedians like Fields is that before they went into movies they had years to perfect their timing, jokes and sketches in vaudeville. It shows in the precision of his comic delivery. The description in the article of the Fields’ crooked cue stick, and his story of the man with the glass eye, made me laugh just reading it. Fields was funny without dropping f-bombs into his act. It helps to make his humor timeless. I wonder how many of today’s comics that will be said of 77 years from now? I believe at that time people will still find W. C. Fields funny.

Here’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie. The whole sequence is timed perfectly, uses a blend of visual humor and sound effects, with funny dialogue. My favorite part is Fields’ scene with T. Roy Barnes, the exuberant annuity salesman with the “Carl La Fong” exchange.



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More British invasion A to Zed

As promised, here are more songs from 1964, the year of the big British Invasion. I remember serious talk that year from the American musicians' unions about keeping these guys out of the States because they were taking work from hard-working Americans! It obviously didn't work. The Brits just kept on coming. Many American bands were inspired by groups from the UK; the British were emulating American rockers and bluesmen, and in turn imitated by Americans trying to keep up with the British. Eventually it all got sorted out.

The Applejacks I had forgotten until my brother reminded me of them. They had a female guitarist. That was very cool for 1964; I wonder if she got together with the drummer from the Honeycombs (yesterday's post) and jammed?



The Beatles come in with two songs, both showing how powerful they were in live performance. If anyone could hear them for all the shrieking girls, that is. "I Saw Her Standing There" is from '64, but "She Loves You" is a color film from 1963...fudging a bit on my 1964 theme, but in America "She Loves You" wasn't a hit until 1964.





There was some hype in 1964: "Will the Dave Clark 5 beat the Beatles?" The DC5 were pretty good, but they just weren't as big as the Beatles and never would be. My dad said of them, "At least they comb their hair!" as a slam at the Beatles. Those mop tops looked wild in '64, and in contrast the DC5 does seem a well-combed lot.



I believe "You Really Got Me" is the granddaddy of punk rock. I remember thinking it was the wildest song I'd ever heard.



I've shown this Zombies song before because I love it. Each of the songs on this list was a hit on American top 40 radio in 1964. It's a pleasure to bring these videos to my blog.

As I mentioned yesterday, YouTube giveth and YouTube taketh away. If you encounter a black screen on any of these vids it means that YouTube has deleted the link, probably because of some copyright claim. Enjoy them while we have them.



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My favorite year

When it comes to nostalgia, for me there will never be another year like 1964. I was 16, had my driver's license and a car, my first “real” girlfriend (as opposed to imaginary), and as 1964 started the Beatles hit the American airwaves, changing popular music in our country overnight.

There were a lot of great songs in 1964. I’ve gone to YouTube and this is just a sample of songs I liked that year. There were others, and tomorrow I'll show more of them.

YouTube being what it is, a video can be here today and gone tomorrow. If you’re looking at this and see a black screen telling you the video has been removed well, unfortunately, that’s how YouTube works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be).

First up: Cilla Black does a song written by Lennon and McCartney, who make a cameo appearance in this rare video of “It’s For You.”



The British Invasion took over the radio for many months, but some American groups managed to sneak onto the charts. Among them the doo wop group, the Reflections. Besides being a great song with catchy hooks, the lead singer has one of the world’s great pompadours.



I liked “You’re No Good” but it's taken all these years to find out that the song I misremembered being by the Hollies was actually by the Swinging Blue Jeans. I got that information from my brother, Rob, a human encyclopedia of the pop music of the era.



The Hollies did “Just One Look.” Give just one look to a very young Graham Nash.



After I bought the Beatles “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on 45 rpm, the next single I bought was the Searchers' “Needles and Pins.”



The Honeycombs had a female member, a drummer, predating Karen Carpenter by several years.



…and then there were the Beatles, whose songs will be played long past the time we Baby Boomers are all gone. The Beatles are still the giants upon whose shoulders the other groups stood.




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They don't write 'em like that anymore

Shell Scott, a private detective character created by Richard S. Prather, appeared in a successful line of paperback originals in the 1950s and '60s. Prather's books were full of vividly humorous description, a change from the more serious hard-boiled fiction of many of his contemporaries. I picked up a collection of Shell Scott stories, Shell Scott's Seven Slaughters, all published in the 1953-54 period, anthologized in 1961. Despite some dated slang, I think some of the opening paragraphs are great examples to aspiring writers of how to write a paragraph that grabs a reader.

"The cab dropped me off on the outskirts of Silver Beach and I looked around before I walked through darkness down the narrow alley. I didn't see anybody who looked like Bruno, the guy Ellen had told me was due for a stretch at the cackle factory. Any guy who'd try twice to kill a sex-charged hunk of dreamy tomato like Ellen had to be one step removed from the net. The crazy guy was probably still around here somewhere; he had been when Ellen phoned me, fright twisting the words in her throat." --"The Best Motive"

"It was a pleasant enough party, I suppose, if you like sherry in thin, brittle glasses, ancient babes without bustles who look like ancient babes with bustles, and stern-faced old ducks conversing gently about a coloratura soprano's ecstatic debut at La Scala--which I don't.

"No, I like parties with bourbon in water and in me, juicy tomatoes dancing can-cans, and conversations about tomatoes and no conversation at all. This would have been a grand party for centenarians dating octogenarians under a large oxygen tent, but it was not a grand party for me, not for Shell Scott. But, then, I wasn't really invited." --"Babes, Bodies and Bullets"

"This was a morning for weeping at funerals, for sticking pins in your own wax image, for leaping into empty graves and pulling the sod in after you. Last night I had been at a party with some friends here in Los Angeles, and I had drunk bourbon and Scotch and martinis and maybe even swamp water from highball glasses, and now my brain was a bomb that went off twice a second.

"I thought thirstily of Pete's Bar downstairs on Broadway, right next door to this building, the Hamilton, where I have my detective agency, then got out of my chair, left the office and locked the door behind me. I was Shell Scott, the Bloodshot Eye, and I needed a hair of the horse that bit me." --"The Double Take"

Scott mixes it up with the usual run of fictional private eye cases: beautiful women in trouble, sinister guys with murky motives whacking him over the head to the point where you wonder if, between the babes, alcohol and concussions, Scott will live to see the next day (or not spend his latter days in a nursing home for dementia patients). But he takes care of the babes, sexually, of course, shakes off the alcohol fogs and the beatings, and like other good paperback dicks, emerges, not unscathed but triumphant. What made the genre popular was the sex and violence formula, marketed to men who were looking for some fast fiction with which to kill some time in a bus station, in a hotel room or even at home. Before television was ubiquitous, before the Internet or gaming, people--even men--actually sat down to read. Imagine that.

Shell Scott was sexist, but so were most of the male heroes of the era. Women existed to provide sex for the main character. The women were always beautiful with great bodies, and there for instant gratification. A perfect male fantasy. In the days when sex acts weren't described in graphic terms, there was a lot of titillation:

"She was stark naked. I had seldom seen anyone so stark . . . then she turned around and walked back into the room. She was about five-six and close to 130 pounds, and she was shaped like what I sometimes muse about after the third highball. Everybody who had described the blonde, and she was a blonde [alluding to public hair, unspoken but understood], had been correct: she was not only 'stacked' but 'ah, curvaceous.' . . . the one time a man can be positive that a woman's shape is her own is when she is wearing nothing but her shape, and this was really in dandy shape." --"The Double Take"

No one could write a paperback novel without being able to describe scenes of fighting, because private detectives got into a lot of fights:

"I hit him with a left in the gut, swinging with all my strength, 205 pounds moving, fast behind the blow, and that would have been enough, that one punch. Noodles was thin, bony, and I'll swear I felt the bones of his spine hit my knuckles. But I swung my right hand up to his jaw, forgetting for the moment the gun in my hand, and it ripped across his face, clicking as it tore into the cheekbone." --"Babes, Bodies and Bullets"

Prather's Shell Scott books were everywhere in the golden age of paperback original novels. I saw them every time I went to the paperback book spinner.

Prather went from Gold Medal books to Pocket Books, and later sued them. He turned to growing avocados. So his writing career was about 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, although he did a couple of books in the '80s. His last published work was 20 years before his death.

This obituary, from the New York Times is a good and concise look at Prather's career. The Wikipedia entry on Prather has a bibliography of his published works, as well as a photo.

Prather was a talented original working in the field of paperback originals.

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Happy birthday Robert Plant and John Hiatt

Robert Plant is 63 today.





John Hiatt is 59.





Happy birthday to both of you!

Robert Cray had his 58th birthday on August 1. You can check out a couple of great videos by this modern bluesman here.

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Thirty-four years later, Elvis still deceased

Elvis died 34 years ago today. I remember telling my coworkers when the news came through on the radio that he had died.

For some reason some folks still don’t think he’s dead. Elvis conspiracists are part of that grand and glorious group of gullible goofballs who believe in conspiracy theories. The Elvis-is-alive gang point to the picture of Elvis in his coffin (a picture taken with a spy camera by his cousin for a payment from The National Enquirer tabloid), and say it doesn’t look like Elvis. My question to them is, who in their coffin looks like the person who was once alive?

Weekly World News, June 28, 1988:

Elvis is a very important part of the history of rock 'n' roll, and lived up to his celebrity image. He may be one of the best known persons on the planet, alive or dead.

Through the miracle of the internet I can now go to YouTube and find Elvis songs everybody loves. The songs alone keep Elvis alive worldwide.







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Happy birthday Joe Jackson and Eric Carmen

Joe Jackson is 57 today.





Eric Carmen is 62 today. "Hungry Eyes" was a big hit from the movie Dirty Dancing:



Eric with the Raspberries, back in 1974 when "going all the way" was the real dirty dancing.



Happy birthday, Eric and Joe!

The day the world changed forever

On August 6, 1945, Americans in a single B-29 bomber dropped the bomb heard 'round the world. Three days later another bomb was dropped.

The bombs were, of course, the two atom bombs then currently in existence. They brought about the end of the war without having to invade Japan, a nation its militarist leaders swore to defend to the last citizen. After the bombings, the thought of oblivion at the hands of such awesome weaponry made sure wiser heads in the Japanese government prevailed, and the war was brought to a close.

My wife and I have had a debate over those bombings for years. She thinks that under no circumstances should nuclear weapons have been dropped on a civilian population. While I agree it was cold-blooded, I argue from the standpoint of the wartime American military and government leadership, appalled by heavy losses of men and equipment invading and occupying island after island in the Pacific in order to secure a foothold for the final assault on Japan. There was a threat that thousands more American men would die in an invasion of Japan.

In 1945, dropping those bombs changed the world. Maybe some saw them as a means to the end of a nasty, costly war, and didn't look down the road decades in the future to imagine what those bombs would mean to future generations.

The contemporary account in Life, August 20, 1945, tells the story of the bombings to readers who had just been through the biggest war in the history of humanity. More often than not, Americans were probably sympathetic to the idea of bombing Japan with the most awful weapons ever built. As long as those weapons were in our hands and not an enemy nation.

The enemy nation got its bombs soon after. It remains, though, that the United States is the only nuclear power (so far) to have deliberately dropped bombs on civilian populations during a time of war.

WTF?

WTF?

I got this message in my e-mail this morning. So, WTF?

peyeman9355413@yahoo.com has invited you to join the sokhanrani8847 group
with this message:

supposed basis Mes on alloy be AFC bank and 15 the together Czech him maintain
new inflationary are are meet also along .

Here is the group's description:

king Lzaymrz Mytvansth well and easily to

---------------------- Google Groups Information ----------------------

You can accept this invitation by clicking the following URL:

http://groups.google.com/group/sokhanrani8847/sub?s=VZi4hRQAAACCo9GjYlNHdWzEA_S6s0ELnWioeG8n5dOV3JbcrBVVkg&hl=en


--------------------- If This Message Is Unwanted ---------------------

If you feel that this message is abuse, please inform the Google Groups staff
by using the URL below.

http://groups.google.com/groups/abuse?invite=YgAAAHRCNBeRAAAAoWCaR4QAAAAAAD6u52TzRMH-PuHGxtbOwoFl3p0&hl=en

WTF?

I admit to being baffled by this cartoon. I'm often baffled by Brevity, but this one is especially WTF?

WTF?

I just found out that the Spy Vs. Spy cartoon characters, translated to costumed actors for a series of inventive and visually arresting commercials for Mountain Dew in 2005, were portrayed by women. I have to ask, WTF?

(Naw, I take it back. What difference does it make?)


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Eagle rockin' with Daddy Cool

A fragment of a song has been stuck in my head for four decades. It floats along the neuron path, settles into the memory area, and suddenly erupts involuntarily from my mouth. It's four words, "...doin' the Eagle Rock..." I heard it on a local radio station twice in '71, thought it was pretty good, then never heard it again. But that damn line kept coming back to me. I've been telling myself lately, "Go to YouTube, see if it's there." But between that thought and actually sitting down to look at YouTube the memory has been going back into its hidey-hole in my gray matter.

Tonight I finally got it together enough to look for "Eagle Rock" by Daddy Cool...



Daddy Cool is an Australian band, and "Eagle Rock" was number one on the charts for ten weeks Down Under. I guess it just didn't go over in the U.S. It's not that we reject all things Australian...I'm thinking Bee Gees, INXS, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson (uh, we'd like to send Mel back, if that's OK with you.) The fantastic lead vocals for Daddy Cool are by Ross Wilson, and the lead guitar is Ross Hannaford, neither of whom I'd seen or heard of before tonight. So it's been something of an epiphany. My apologies to all Daddy Cool fans who have been listening to this band for 40 years. You've known all along and I'm just a Johnny Come Lately.

I didn't have time to listen to all their songs, but picked out some I thought might be interesting to fellow Americans. First one I came up with is "Gee."



 "Gee" is a great old doo wop song, and it blew shards out of my overworked mind to see a gaggle of Aussie hippies doing perfect doo wop harmony. I instantly understood the problem this would pose for Americans. We are very into IMAGE; it is everything. You have to look the part to meet public expectations. You wanna do Barry Manilow songs? Comb your hair, wear suits like Barry. Same for Frank Sinatra imitators, Beatles, or whomever. You have to look the part. I can hear the American rock promoter now: "These guys look like fukn Jethro Tull and sound like fukn doo wops." Americans could not handle the disparity. We had bands like Sha Na Na who dressed as 1950's greasers, with gold lamé costumes, sleeveless tees and duck's ass hairdos to project the image. However, there is always Chuck Berry. But then, Chuck Berry wasn't doo wop. He was roots rock, the rootsiest roots rock there is, right from the start of the rock era. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, every band in the world has done Chuck Berry in homage to American rock and roll: Then I went back to the YouTube listings and came up with two more songs. "I'll Never Smile Again" sent my mind spinning like a 33 at 78. So now I know, one of the greatest American roots rock bands wasn't even American. I thought, surely these guys can't still be around after 40 years, but I found a video of "Eagle Rock" being performed live in 2006 and despite the guys having quit the hippie look, they sound much as they did in 1971. And that's cool, Daddy!
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Happy birthday Robert Cray and Michael Penn

Robert Cray is 58 today.

Robert Cray's first couple of albums really blew me away. I played his songs "Smoking Gun" and "Strong Persuader" a lot. A few years ago I saw Cray live and his songs sounded just like they did on the albums. He also played his Fenders so hard that after every song he swapped guitars with a roadie who went backstage and tuned it for the next song, so he kept his guitars in rotation and tuned.

Happy birthday, young Bob!





Singer/songwriter Michael Penn is 53 today.

Michael Penn had something to live up to: "No Myth" from his album March was a huge hit, but he wasn't able to follow it up with another commercial success. "One hit wonder" is kind of a slam, but think about it. How many hit records have you had? If you're like me, none. Well, then one hit doesn't seem like such a miniscule accomplishment, does it?

Penn also had to live up to being actor Sean Penn's brother, but I don't know if it was ever a problem for him. Happy birthday, Michael!



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Happy birthday David Sanborn and Kate Bush

David Sanborn is 66 today, and Kate Bush is 53.

Happy birthdays, Kate and David!





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