It can now be told that Prometheus is very much the Alien prequel it was presumed to be all along, but a prequel in the sense that it lives on the same timeline as the Alien universe resides. One movie does not end to begin the next, and yet there will be significant linkage to force the fans of Scott’s 1979 breakthrough into multiplex seats.  Put it this way, this is not how Darth Vader came to be and then we see where that led. This would be more about the great-great-grandparents of Anakin Skywalker, to draw the analogy with the broadest strokes. This is about the stuff that happened way before the stuff.

What has been so great about how everything’s been handled up to this point is not what we’ve been told. It started with Scott’s initial statements of wanting to revisit that specific dark corner of the universe again, and fanboy nation lit up with glee over the prospect of more Alien films with the man that started it all.

It’s been a long time since the thought of going back there to LV-426 has been a good one, but not for lack of trying. James Cameron did surprisingly well by the premise, but that was because he understood it. Scott didn’t make a science-fiction movie initially, but instead made an Agatha Christie mystery set in a haunted house in space. That’s Alien in a nutshell. Cameron then made a war drama that was equal parts a broken-family drama, only it played out in a creepy crawly hive full of xenomorphs. Those who followed them had no wiggle room for reinvention, so David Fincher (Alien III) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, The City of Lost Children) & Joss Whedon (yes, that Joss Whedon was a writer for Alien Resurrection) were stuck making Alien movies that were movies about Alien. They were saddled with the literal.

The Alien vs. Predator flicks that came after were little more than the over-stimulated wet dreams of the fan market too agitated to know that what they wanted and what was actually good were two separate things. They got explosions, carnage, star creeps, and that was it. It was a salad with no vegetables; all bacon bits and croutons, and it had equal capacity to nauseate. It also had the very strong possibility of destroying two of Fox’s most recognizable franchises (which is probably being very generous to Predator, which really only has the John McTiernan original to stand up for it).

Rant begins. I will leave this point alone for the most part, but would say that Fox had any number of ridiculously tempting possibilities on their table when it came to the Predator series, and faced with such a tempting array, they ate the packet of crackers instead, giving us gory b-movie fare instead. There was a whole societal order that could have been developed to make something damned near epic, and what did they do? They made a bunch of movies about a space Rastafarian that, like Ted Nugent, likes to hunt because “I likes ta hunt.” Rant ends.

It was a great time for Scott to step back into this realm because, frankly, it couldn’t get any worse. And any marketing division of any studio would give their eyeteeth, first-born and probably a testicle (perhaps not their own, but still) to pump Ridley Scott’s Return To Alien! Yet it didn’t go like that. The script was kept in a perpetual state of lockdown. No images were emerging, secrecy was sworn, and the primary thrust of press was that there was no press. Scott himself made denial his modus operandi, insisting the rules had changed. This was not an Alien movie, there’s nothing to see here, and bugger off.

Nobody is going to tell Ridley Scott what to do, but you can rightly imagine Fox wanted to, and wanted to very, very badly. Modern movie marketing now begins before the script is even completed. The treatment isn’t even emailed over before the marketing department is spreading the word around. On-set photos and details are disseminated, divulged and dissected on the internet before formal casting has even been finalized, and the final trailer for the movie winds up being more a two-minute version with a beginning, a middle, and far too much of an ending for anyone to even care about plunking down the $12-$15 dollars for a ticket afterward. Some of the worst experiences I’ve had at the movies in the past decade have been watching trailers that start off as intriguing, wind up telling me too much, and in the end make actually viewing the film superfluous. I saw it. It was the trailer, it was a free viewing and, frankly, it sucked.

The most masterful thing about Prometheus is that it has told us only what we needed to know at any given moment. It is science-fiction. It has basis in previous material. It will be similar in spirit to any number of previous efforts but might not actually be a part of those. Only recently has it come to light that, yes, this is the place where the Alien saga begins, but is not the most direct of descendants. Large parts of that info was not told to us, but was teased out and hinted at in the trailers, and because we weren’t told the entire story beforehand, we actually watched the trailers, searching for clues, making up assumptions and forging connections, and we talked about how it could pair up with our beliefs and preconceptions. In other words, everything that has come out up to this point has been carefully put out crumb-by-crumb to get you to actually go into the trap, which was what trailers and marketing were supposed to be about. They weren’t about giving you the YouTube edition.

So even if Prometheus ends up as disappointing, it has given back the audience of 2012 one thing it once had (or heard about) – the mystery and expectation of going to see a movie. The possibility of walking into the screening with a bunch of questions and almost no answers is a pleasing one, and one I hope Fox and the rest of Hollywood takes to heart. The audience wants to want.

I have always been more of a melodic guy rather than lyrical. When I hear a song for the first time, it comes down to the melody to charm me. Maybe that’s because I’m from Iceland and English is my second language, but I still feel the same way with Icelandic songs. However, even if I like the melody, the lyrics also have to make sense for the song to become a favorite. The beauty of music is that both the melody and lyrics are ways for the songwriters to express their emotions.

When I write a song, I always come up with the melody first. I press record on my computer, play some chords on my guitar and sing a melody with lyrics that make no sense. I try to create a melody that reflects the way I really feel at that time. Afterwards, I write lyrics that fit the mood of the moment.

Luckily, I am full of joy most of the time and therefore, some of the tunes are full of happiness. I find that music helps me even more whenever I’m down, because I can collect all of my feelings into one song and just spit it all out.

Only once have I been heartbroken; I was 20 years old, and it felt like my life was over. After a few weeks, I sat down with my guitar to try and get rid of all those distracting emotions. It was as if I fell into a trance, because both the melody and the words just came to me. I had an old PC laptop in front of me that could only record one minute at a time, but I just kept hitting the rec button and five minutes later I had a song; a song that said everything that was going through my mind. The song is called “To Her” because the words were directed to the girl that made me feel this way.

Visit Jon’s Bandcamp site to hear (and purchase) the rest of his latest album, Wait for Fate.

1. David Curcurito,  Eddie Van Halen: The Esquire Interview (esquire.com, posted 4/17/12). The source material for the Esquire feature provides a few more interesting tidbits on the notoriously press-shy gee-tar god. I call bullshit, though, on Van Halen’s assertion about Roth: “We never really hated each other …We’ve never on a personal level not gotten along.” Anyone with fifteen minutes and either an Internet connection or a copy of Roth’s memoir will see the quote for the bit of Pasadena-style historical revision that it is. It does the ol’ ticker good, however, to see proof of Van Halen’s recovery, both from recurring tongue and throat cancer and from the alcoholism I was convinced would take him eventually. The twin influences of his second wife and his bass-playing offspring have apparently kept him on the straight ‘n’ narrow for the last few years, and the prospect of making more music like the smile-inducin’, Godzilla-stompin’ racket on A Different Kind of Truth could make sobriety stick this time. We can only hope.

2. Renee & Jeremy, A Little Love (One Melody Records, 2012). I hate Coldplay, but I will admit (grudgingly, but I do so much else with a grudge of late, it really doesn’t matter) that I put “Yellow” on a couple mix discs back in, like, 2000 or 2001. Whodathunk it’d be such a great song for kids? Then again, damned near anything Renee Stahl and Jeremy Toback set their voices and instruments to becomes great kindie music. Here, they feast on a plateful of cool folk and rock tunes, both obvious (“Shiny Happy People”) and not so much so. Their run through Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit” is well served by the effortless harmonies that flow out of the pair. John Lennon’s “Love” gets a playful romp that is wholly original in its conception and execution, and Jackie DeShannon’s” Put a Little Love in Your Heart” becomes a languid anthem for the kindergarten set. The only misstep is their take on Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away,” which simply flies too far afield of the original to work (they also chicken out on the “What I got you gotta get it put it in you” line. Boo! I understand, but “Boo!” anyway).

That aside, the record works; Renee & Jeremy aren’t just great kindie artists; they’re a great indie folk duo who I image would make excellent work in whatever genre they choose. A Little Love whets the appetite for another album of originals; right now, though, to hear “Yellow” in a non-Coldplay context is sufficient.

3. Marvel’s The Avengers (Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2012). As a friend noted on Facebook last week, “People sure have a hard-on for superhero movies.” My inner seven-year-old concurs (though I don’t think he would quite use those terms) and joins my outer fortysomething in enjoying the hell out of this orgy of Marvelousness. The non-IMAX 3-D was worthless (if you saw the IMAX, sound off below) but the CGI actually seemed soulful, Downey’s wisecracking Tony Stark was spot-on brilliant (who else is ever going to play that role in the eventual reboot?), and they finally got the Hulk right. The masterstroke, though, is Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the perfect blend of arrogance and evil. And the mid-credits reveal of Thanos as a potential next villain sets things up perfectly for the next brace of sequels—Iron Man 3 (May 2013), Thor 2 (November 2013), Captain America 2 (April 2014), and, if ye gods be with us, another Avengers flick by the time my inner seven-year-old turns ten.

4. “I Am Steve Albini, Ask Me Anything” Reddit Chat (posted 5/8/12). Albini might not be a universally beloved guy, but he has produced one of my favorite albums of this year (Attack on Memory, by Cloud Nothings), one of my favorite albums of the last five years (Manic Street Preachers’ Journal for Plague Lovers), as well as most of my favorite rock album of the last 20 years (Nirvana’s In Utero). Here, he takes on all comers, answering questions both informed and inane, and shares some memories that are quite interesting, and some opinions that are—well, Albinian. Read it.

5. Martha Waggoner, “N.C. OKs Same-Sex Marriage Amendment,”  (time.com, posted 5/9/12); “Transcript: Robin Roberts ABC News Interview with President Obama” (abcnews.go.com, posted 5/9/12); Blerd, “Blerditorial: What Did Gay People Ever Do To You?”  (popblerd.com, posted 5/10/12); Margaret Talbot, “Wedding Bells,”  (newyorker.com, posted 5/14/12). I admit to being ignorant of North Carolina’s Prop 1 until I stumbled upon the Web site of my former parochial school’s parent church. Two weeks before the legislation to write discrimination into the state’s constitution was thrown open to voters, the church’s pastor spent an entire set of Sunday services setting out the supposed Biblical argument for not only denying same-sex couples the legal ability to marry, but even having their non-marriage domestic unions nullified in the eyes of the state. Let me reiterate this—the pastor of a decent-sized church in North Carolina (a tax-exempt entity, mind you) spent the bulk of his pulpit time one Sunday advocating for a law that discriminates against certain citizens. Discrimination. The pastor of a church. And I’ll bet whatever’s in my wallet against whatever’s in your wallet that he was not alone.  ’Twas appalling, but not at all surprising.

I tried for years to reconcile the religion I was taught as a child, with what I, in my heart, knew and somewhat feared I actually believed, or, more to the point, didn’t believe. I was 18 when I turned my back on the church, while still holding out the hope I would regain faith. I was 35 when I finally gave up. The seeds of my loss of faith were sewn during what I typically joke was my period of “incarceration” in the school run by the same judgmental and insufferably self-righteous people who agitated for the approval of Prop 1. The fact that these supposed people of a supposed God worked toward the incorporation of discrimination into state law belies any teaching of their God’s love for his flock, if they even bother to incorporate that into their sermons anymore. I seem to recall a lot more brimstone and torture and retribution in their sermons back in the day.

My issues with religious matters aside, I would have some skin in this fight, due to my relationships with people who would be affected by such legal shenanigans, were they to creep into the constitutions of Pennsylvania (where I live) and elsewhere. My best friend—a man I have known for 25 years, and whom I consider a brother—lives a short drive from where I’m writing this, but had to go to Vermont last year to get married. His husband cannot be seen as more than a “friend” or “significant other” or (their least favorite term) a “partner” (though not in the legal sense) in PA. They two are as perfect for one another as my wife of 17 years and I are for one another, and they deserve to have their marriage recognized wherever they go.

I am emotionally invested when something heinous and overreaching like Prop 1 comes up and is held up as God’s will by religious conservatives and made into law. I am also emotionally invested in the comment by President Obama—in whom so many have invested so much emotion—in favor of same-sex marriage. He sure as hell waited long enough. I tire of hearing about his “bravery” or his “gamble” in an election year; as Margaret Talbot so correctly notes, “One day, not long from now, it will be hard to remember what worried people so much about gay and lesbian couples committing themselves to marriage. And, when that day comes, President Obama’s remarks last week … will seem mild and obvious.” True, for the President of the United States to have your back—to instruct his administration’s Justice Department to refrain from defending the abysmal “Defense of Marriage Act,” for example—is a positive thing. But it seems a lot less like courage when compared to the courage required to be a committed gay couple in North Carolina right now.

I think of my friend, who goes by the nom de Web Blerd, when I consider Prop 1 and what a slithering pile of religious conservatives can do to people they don’t even know, or perhaps even some they do. Or—who knows?—perhaps those religious conservatives themselves have something they wish to hide. “There are a lot of self-loathing homos out there,” Blerd (a gay man) says, “and one need only look at the past 5-10 years in American politics and folks like Ted Haggard to infer that the people who fight the hardest against something are usually doing so to deflect attention away from them doing that exact thing.” Or perhaps they are among the high-profile right-wing mouthpieces—[cough] Limbaugh [cough] Gingrich—who harp on the “sanctity” of marriage, or the “institution” of marriage, while having gone through two or three divorces themselves.

I get angry about the issue, both about the obvious lack of fairness involved, as well as toward the smallest of the small-minded who manage to push that lack of fairness into legal forums (I also get angry at what I presume to be the non-voting majority that can’t seem to make it to the polls when these issues are put to a vote). Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Perhaps it is the eventuality of universally legal same-sex marriage in my lifetime—the ultimate middle finger to the proponents of Prop 1—that I should think about instead. I do think about that from time to time. And I smile.

6. Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Tom Gabel,” (Rolling Stone, 5/24/12 issue). The artist currently known as Laura Jane Grace:

It’s AM Gold: 1973! Get comfortable, folks, because we’re feeling analytical this week.

(Spotify users, you can subscribe to our Best of AM Gold playlist, which is updated regularly.)

#1: Helen Reddy, “Delta Dawn” – #1 U.S. Hot 100 and Easy Listening; knocked Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” out of the top Hot 100 spot for one week.

Jack Feerick - Didn’t there used to be a couple of more verses to this? Wasn’t there a whole vaguely Faulknerian narrative to it? In this version, it’s been stripped down to nothing but the highlights — the huge chorus, a couple of key changes, not one but two a cappella breakdowns, and more drum fills and horn kicks than most bands manage in a whole album. It’s a ruthlessly efficient thrill machine. But still: Wasn’t this supposed to be a song that told a story?

Dw. Dunphy - Jack, you probably are thinking of Tanya Tucker’s original version, not Helen Reddy’s cover.

David Lifton - Even though I would later learn to appreciate country (even the slick, popular crap because of the quality of the production and performances), this was one of the songs I heard at a very young age that made me hate it all.

Jon Cummings - So, we’re in story-song heaven (or hell) this week, which pretty much sums up 1973 (and the early part of the ’70s in general, for pop fans). You guys so far aren’t being too kind to poor ”Delta Dawn,” but my affection for it exists on several levels. For one thing, while it’s really only half-formed as a story-song (no, Jack, there’s no more to it than this, in Tanya Tucker’s version or anywhere else), it does have one of the greatest opening lines of any pop song ever: “She’s 41 and her daddy still calls her ‘baby.’” It’s a line worthy of Tennessee Williams — even if the rest of the lyric falls far short of that. For another thing, its progress from composition to two smash singles is one of those great old song-plugger stories that don’t happen anymore (not outside Nashville, at least) — see Wikipedia for the song’s lineage from Tracy Nelson to Bette Midler to Tucker to being rejected by Barbra Streisand, and finally to Reddy.

Then there’s my personal connection to Reddy, discussed in depth in last week’s column — she popped my cherry, pop-concert wise, when my parents took me to see her in Nashville. Also, her Greatest Hits album from ’75 was one of the few rock-era pop records in my dad’s collection — he was a huge jazz fan — and so it was (along with Sgt. Pepper, Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme and a couple others I can’t recall) one of the targets of my early raids on his LPs, before I started buying in bulk myself. Even back then, while I liked a lot of Reddy’s singles, I would listen to that GH record as a 10-year-old and think that Reddy seemingly had no idea what kind of singer she wanted to be, apart from a successful one. To go from the success she had with the Broadway ballad “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” the feminist anthem “I Am Woman” and the very classy ”Peaceful” (my favorite of her singles) — three songs upon which you might think a female singer would want to build a thematic structure for her career — to the countryfied “Delta Dawn” and its similarly anti-feminist (but sorta vaudevillian) follow-up, “Ruby Red Dress,” within a year … it’s practically whiplash-inducing.

But beyond Helen’s career and the specifics of “Delta Dawn,” I want to introduce a concept that the first three of our entrants this week all bring to mind — and that is my theory that the early-’70s trend toward story songs, cheesy and awful though they often were, represents the inevitable commodification of the early-’60s Folk Revival and, indeed, a high-water mark (in terms of listeners reached, if not quality) for the merging of recorded folk and pop music. Without taking all of this to a ridiculous level of bullshit abstraction … or maybe it’s already too late … I first thought about this concept during grad school when, in a folklore class that influenced me greatly, I was assigned to read Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and John Berger’s classic book Ways of Seeing. Both of those authors make the argument that our contemporary mass-reproduction of artworks – from records/cassettes/CDs/downloads to films/VHS/DVD/downloads to coffee-table art books/computerized museum catalogs/screen savers – have demeaned, trivialized, even destroyed the authority of art forms that once had to be experienced in person. The idea being that the easier the public access to a commoditized version of an artwork – the more ubiquitous it becomes as a part of our common experience – the less substantial and valuable they become. Like many theoretical responses to the world, this one is overly broad and easy to poke holes into … but if we narrow its scope to the commercialization of folk music, it’s not hard to see its relevance to a progression from the first printing of the Childe ballads to the Carter Family to Joan Baez’s early success, and then to the watered-down pop hits of the Folk Revival, and finally to the half-finished “Delta Dawn” and the mercilessly pop-ified “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.”

I’ll stop now.

Dunphy - Jon, I’ll buy that rationale and add that there was an element of “somebody else’s life” that played into it. Where there was so much belief in the Sixties that “We can change the world and, in fact, we are,” the story-songs seem to me a digression that indicated a generation that was feeling kind of burned. By moving on to someone else’s story they could momentarily not think of their own, and how it went so far from the plan…

Cummings - Dw., I think your idea about ’70s listeners escaping their disappointments through story songs is worth considering, the same way that films and TV offer escape — though I’d suggest that the folks who were making hits out of “Delta Dawn” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” (and particularly “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and “The Night Chicago Died,” which I’m sure we’ll be discussing at some point) were not the same folks who built their ’60s lives around hopes that were snuffed out by Nixon/Cambodia/Kent State/Watergate/etc. Besides that, you’re flying in the face of 35 years of conventional wisdom/ oversimplification that ’70s culture was all about retreating INTO oneself after the expansive focus of the ’60s — the “Me Decade” and all that.

Dan Wiencek - Is a deep sociological reason really required here? I have a simpler theory: that innovative songwriters of the ’60s, led by Bob Dylan, began to expand the parameters of the popular song lyric in many ways, whether in terms of narrative (i.e., “story songs”), political focus, allegorical/metaphoric imagery or some combination of all three. The result was that audiences gradually became accustomed to, and even came to expect, lyrics that went beyond the conventional romantic themes that had characterized most popular songs in the years prior. (Not that the latter ever went away, of course, or ever will.) So-called story songs — a problematic category if ever there was one — would then just be considered one outgrowth of a generational shift in what audiences expected from pop lyrics.

Chris Holmes - So can we blame Bob Dylan for “American Pie” then?

Wiencek - I blame Buddy Holly.

Lifton - I blame Mike Love.

Dunphy - I blame it on the Bossa Nova. Cuchi cuchi.

I think everyone has a point as far as that goes. From my perspective I’m saying that generational culture swings often from “us” to “them” and back, usually as a reaction to the political headwinds. When the audience is most worried about the realities of their lives, they find comfort in the stories of others, sometimes reflecting their situations and sometimes not. When the politics and social situations are relatively stable, the focus shifts to “me and my life” in so far as the singer is involved.

I base my opinion on nothing though, so my guess is as good or bad as any. All I know is that in the 1960s Pink Floyd looked to space and the weird colors. In the 70s and early 80s they looked to Syd Barrett falling apart, and to each other with contempt. The lesson: never base your sociological argument on the output of Pink Floyd.

Wiencek - Perhaps I should abandon that monograph I’ve been working on, “And Everything Was Green and Submarine: The Fall of the New Left and the Rise of the Silent Majority as Seen Through the Lyrics of Roger Waters.”

Cummings - You’d be better off with “as seen through the lyrics of David Gates.”

#2: Jim Croce, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” – #1 U.S.

Feerick - It’s not that I don’t have any time for Jim Croce — I remain fond of “I Got a Name,” for instance — but to follow up “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” with something so much in the same vein seems less like evidence of an artistic fascination with the American outlaw idiom, and more like a trip back to the well.

Dunphy - I’ve been trying to figure out why Croce’s first couple of hits were so similar, and for that matter why these stories of bad guys seemed to be so desirable in the early 1970′s. My best guess was that it was a reactionary thing, that after so many years of peace and love and flower power, some artists craved indulgence in the inverse. That might explain why Croce had “Jim” and “Leroy Brown,” Emerson Lake & Palmer had “Benny The Bouncer” and so many others spanned the territories once trod by the likes of Stagger Lee.

Does that make “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” better or worse. Hard to say. It is a rollicking song that, out of it’s own context is just an easy example of piano blues-pop. It might be hard to love the song but it is not hard to like it, or to sing along with it which is its primary asset.

In the bigger scheme of Croce’s work, it comes off as more mechanical. Well that worked from the last song, that was a hit, so let’s do that again and we should have another hit. If that is the case, he was right, as I think “Leroy Brown” has become the song most people associate first with Croce (followed by “I’ve Got A Name” and “Time In A Bottle”). Short term gains however show some of the artifice of the song, which is a problem but not so much a problem as most of the music that came from the 50s and 60s. Artists found a niche and stayed there, or else their writing/production associates put them there. Example: The Drifters have three songs closely associated with them, and all three are about places to make out at: “Under The Boardwalk,” “Saturday Night At The Movies,” and “Up On The Roof.” All three sound similar, have similar subjects, and all three were hits. This stuff is formulaic, but the formula often proves true.

With that in mind, it is only in hindsight that I can get fidgety with Croce’s musical doppelgangers. He traded in pop traditions more than one cares to admit.

Lifton - One of those that was fun to sing as a kid, and there still things to like in it as an adult, such as the acoustic lead underneath the vocal. But if you were blasting this in your car with the windows down you’d be pretty damn embarrassed. Still, a song about a badass caught up in a love triangle that ends up in a bar killing. Does that mean we can blame Jim for “Copacabana?”

Cummings - This track’s enormous popularity takes it, for me, outside the realm of discussing it in terms of Croce’s career arc. Yes, it’s of a piece with “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” but as I noted when we talked about that song a few weeks ago, “Leroy Brown” certainly is a refinement of that blue-collar-bar-fight ethos. And Croce certainly came by that ethos honestly, having grown up in South Philly and then having spent a spell driving a truck and working construction when he got fed up with the music biz in the late ’60s.

#3: Dawn feat. Tony Orlando, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” – #1 U.S. and U.K.; best-selling U.K. single in 1973.

Feerick – Man, there’s a lot of story-songs this week, aren’t there?

It’s determinedly old-timey sounding, complete with faux tap-dancing sounds in the background. None of it would sound out of place on the Lawrence Welk show — except for Tony’s vocals, which falter on the high notes as Bing Crosby’s never would.

Say, what do you reckon ol’ Tony O was in for, anyway?

Cummings - Considering all the varying ethnicities in play when it came to Tony, Telma & Joyce, I’d guess it was a Mann Act violation.

Dunphy - I was picturing counterfeiting, myself.

Lifton - Various musical crimes, Jack.

Dunphy - Harmless fluff that near a decade on would be reduced to a national assignment, and two decades on would be as shallow and meaningless as any overblown symbolism. Forty years on and this sentimental trifle winds up as part of a collection that includes Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The U.S.A.” and fatuous soundbites like “freedom isn’t free.”

Cummings -  Returning to my earlier ramble — and riffing off Jack’s note that the track sounds like it emerged from the music-hall tradition — it’s worth noting how this song, and single, bring together (and dumb down for mass consumption) a bunch of disparate musical and folk styles. The lyric is straight out of the folkloric tradition — yellow ribbons having been a traditional sign of fidelity between separated lovers, and the New York Post editor Pete Hamill having written (or adapted from oral tradition) a story called “Going Home,” which was turned into a TV movie in ’72, about an ex-con waiting to see a yellow hankie on a tree in his hometown.

All of which makes “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” the corn-pone midpoint of a legacy that has resulted in millions of 21st-century Americans believing that slapping yellow-ribbon magnets on their cars represents a significant-enough contribution to the (endless) war effort. It’s as though George Bush followed up his post-9/11 “go do some shopping, or the terrorists win” spiel by telling us, “I’m putting our volunteer army into two wars while lowering taxes on the wealthy. But if you’ll put a yellow ribbon on your car, our enemies will know we mean business.” Sadly, I’ve come to view yellow ribbons with skepticism verging on disgust — though not quite to the level of revulsion I used to feel at those t-shirts and bumper stickers that read, “I SUPPORT PRESIDENT BUSH … and our troops.”

I’ll stop now.

#4: Three Dog Night, “Shambala” – #3 U.S.

Feerick - My renewed exposure to Three Dog Night in this series isn’t really changing my opinion about the group, sadly. I mean, I like the way it sounds — the semi-distorted electric piano (or is it a clavinet?) growling away, the big harmonies at the bridge, the tasty volume-swell guitar solos — but in the end, the best I can say is that it’s perfectly listenable. No less, but sadly no more.

Chris Holmes - For me, this is the only song in the bunch that I would listen to on purpose again. It’s certainly got the most teeth out of anything here. I’ve got the Three Dog Night greatest hits collection and am usually not disappointed when something pops up on shuffle, but I wouldn’t ever sit and listen all the way through.

Dunphy - These guys sure did have a thing for faux spiritualism, didn’t they? “Shambala” is more exotic than “Joy To The World” however, and the whole thing rests on the meaningless chant-style portions “Ah-wooo-ooo, hey, yeah, yeah” bits.

It’s not to say I dislike Three Dog Night, although my previous things about them in other AM Gold columns would lead someone to believe that. The truth is there just isn’t so much to get passionate about when it comes to this band, and this song is no different. I can’t imagine it was much different in their times either. They had fans, and their record sales proved that to be true, but I can’t believe they were of the die-hard, t-shirt wearing, camping-out-for-concert-tickets type. If anything, it would be like, “Oh I think I can get Three Dog Night tickets. Would that be groovy with you if we could go?” The reply would be, “Yeah, that would be neato. Or we can steal a bottle of vodka and hang out at your house when your parents are away.”

And that kinda sums up my feelings about Three Dog Night. They’re only so good until something better comes along.

A side note here: Three Dog Night, Jim Croce, The Grass Roots, and future AM Gold subjects Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods, Steely Dan, and Stephen Bishop were all on the ABC Records label (sometimes ABC Dunhill). Most of these names have a common sound about them, so my beliefs that there was a bit of label machinery involved with their output might not be too far off the mark.

Lifton – Remember that TV show Wings? It wasn’t a great show, but it was enjoyable and inoffensive with a solid ensemble cast. It worked best for NBC as the 8:30 show, something to have on in the background after Friends and before Seinfeld. Three Dog Night is the Wings of the early ’70s.

Dunphy, there’s a reason why a lot of the ABC/Dunhill stuff has a similar sound. Gary Katz was a staff producer at the label in the early-70s. At the time, they also had a young songwriting team hired to supply material, but very little of it was recorded because the songs were too weird and complex for the Grass Roots and Three Dog Night. But Katz got what they were doing and felt it would be more productive to let the songwriters record their own work. Thus began the career of Steely Dan.

Cummings - As an ode to hippie nirvana, “Shambala” seems kinda late to the party, doesn’t it? I’m pretty sure Jerry Rubin was already thinking about putting on a suit by this point, the whole NYC-radicalism thing having faded with Nixon’s re-election. In that sense, ”Shambala” reminds me (in theme, not style) of John Lennon’s Mind Games album from ’73, which seemed stuck in a post-Woodstock wheel-spinning whose idealism and slogans (“Make love, not war” and all that) had petered out with McGovern’s electoral slaughter, if not after Kent State two years before. All of that said, “Shambala” has a fantastic groove, and I’m never unhappy to hear it (and trill along, horribly, in the car with the windows up). As I’ve noted before, and as I said about Helen Reddy above, Three Dog Night seemed to have no sense of who they were as a band — but whichever momentary version of the band made “Shambala” was a good one.

#5: Dobie Gray, “Drift Away” – #5 U.S.; the second of Gray’s two Top 10 American singles.

Feerick - To borrow a word from Lifton: Holy.

Dunphy - There are artists who work a career to get something near as good as this. There may be mechanical moments in here, but I can’t hear them at all. It is perfect, seamless soul that has been attempted replication more times than I care to think about, and none come close.

Paging Matthew Bolin: It’s probably worth mentioning that “Drift Away” via Dobie Gray is, in itself, a cover. Nonetheless, he made his version the primary version.

Lifton - In other hands, this wouldn’t have worked. I’m kind of wary rock songs about rock music that were written after, say, 1964. Yes, I’m including Billy Joel in there, and Huey Lewis (fuck you, Giles!). In the Playback box set, Tom Petty laughed at how their first two albums had songs  with “rock n’ roll” in the title, as they felt it needed to be saved. That’s kind of how I feel about this “Drift Away.” But at the same time, it’s done so beautifully that I don’t care.

Cummings - Please DON’T page Matthew, actually, because if we do we might hear from some poor sap who thought that Uncle fucking Kracker’s version of “Drift Away” was the original. Let’s page Michael Bolton, instead, and have a conversation about soul songs that didn’t need covering at all, and why all proceeds from such endeavors should be donated to that organization that helps ancient blues musicians get hip replacements, or whatever. (I know Dobie sings the last verse of UK’s cover — and I hope, for the sake of UK’s mortal soul, that Dobie got paid considerably more than scale for doing so.)

For me, “Drift Away” is a perfect way to spend three minutes, and always will be. I don’t even want to try to put my love for it into words — but it’s one of my earliest radio memories, and hearing it brings to mind all sorts of great images of my life when I was 7 years old. Instead of attempting to parse its greatness, I’ll just offer a shout-out to the great Nashville session guitarist Reggie Young, who’s responsible for millions of us spending our early childhoods singing, ”Bowr-bup-bup-bup-bup-BUP-bup-bowr-bowwwwwwrrrrrrr.” (What bizarre human instinct causes us to try to imitate instrumental parts vocally when we sing along to the radio?) 

For the first time in a generation, a competitive congressional race is percolating in my Ventura County, CA district. This series explores the local, statewide and national implications of a campaign that was born of voter discontent and might just wind up transforming Congress, and our politics in general. I outlined the parameters of the race here, and a couple weeks ago I interviewed the independent candidate, Linda Parks, who is starting to gain national attention for her quixotic quest.

An overflow audience crowded every inch of sitting and standing room at a local conference hall last Monday night, craning their necks and getting their partisan hackles raised even before the 26th congressional district’s six candidates had entered the room. The scene was a debate – the first and perhaps only one to feature all of those six competitors on the same stage in advance of the June 5 open primary, which will send the top two vote-getters to the general election regardless of party affiliation. Expectations were sky-high amongst the onlookers for a partisan slugfest with a twist … that twist being the presence of a well-known independent candidate who has based her candidacy on pointing out every instance of her rivals’ partisan slugging.

Events pretty much played out as advertised – a steady diet of ideological back-and-forth, simmered with accusations of malfeasance and lack of qualification – and spiced with disrespectful rejoinders from the conservatives in the audience, who at times threatened to turn the proceedings into a 2009-style “town hall” debacle. The one Republican on the stage, state senator Tony Strickland, behaved like the confident and well-funded frontrunner he is, while the leading Democrat in the race, state assemblywoman Julia Brownley, spent the evening firing off round after caustic round at the liberal bull’s-eye of 2012, the Paul Ryan budget. The independent, Linda Parks, turned every answer into a critique of the two-party system and the disquieting influence of special interests on both Strickland and Brownley’s campaigns. Left sucking for oxygen were two lesser Democratic candidates whose presence can only be described as vanity affairs, while a Hispanic harbor commissioner named Jess Herrera spent the debate struggling valiantly to raise his profile above potential-spoiler status.

It was an unusually fiery debate, for these parts – one befitting the national focus that has been placed on this race by the major parties and their PAC cohorts, which are threatening to break previous records for spending by outside entities in a primary for a House seat. But while it accomplished much by allowing the principal candidates to mark their respective partisan (or non-partisan) territories, it didn’t offer voters much reason to like any of them. Strickland, Brownley and Parks walked into that room as ideological archetypes rather than captivating personalities; sadly, while all of them stuck the landings on their talking points, not one of them emerged looking any more attractive as individuals.

Sixteen years ago a documentary film titled A Perfect Candidate offered a sobering look at the malaise that has swamped contemporary politics – as embodied by the squalid and uninspiring “leaders” who are driven to compete for money and votes, as well as the uninformed and belligerent voters who elect or reject them. The film was a blow-by-blow account of the 1994 U.S. Senate race in Virginia, which featured two candidates who had entered the race with considerable (if questionably earned) star power: the incumbent, the LBJ in-law and former governor Chuck Robb, and the challenger, the Iran-Contra hero/criminal Oliver North. That election year featured a GOP electorate practically as exuberant in their irrationality as the Tea Partiers of 2010 — and Ollie’s turn as the uniformed, loyal-to-a-fault (and I do mean fault) Reaganite sent conservative activists and funders screaming to the barricades in an effort to get him into the Senate. But the resulting campaign was ugly and desultory, and disillusioning for both sides. The documentary portrayed two out-of-their-depth candidates who were clueless about how to translate expectations into ideas, or how to mobilize their bases for positive action rather than merely to fear and loathe the other side.

Unfortunately, a similar dynamic threatens to take hold here in CA-26 this year, because none of the top contenders seems to boast the combination of charisma and inspirational messaging that will send voters streaming to the polls to vote for something, rather than against something else. There is no lefty heroine like Elizabeth Warren in this race, no macho man like Arnold Schwarzenegger to fire conservatives’ loins – not even a Jesse Ventura to mix a spoonful of populist sugar into the medicine of anti-partisan moderation. That dynamic may change after June 5, depending on who’s left standing and how much money is poured into negative advertising. But for now, the three-week race to the primary seems a contest to see which candidate voters will find least compelling at the finish line.

Strickland, for example, is the type of frat-boy conservative – cool and confident in his demeanor, doctrinaire in his ideology, and situational in his ethics when it comes to attracting corporate donors and doling out the quid pro quo – that soothes what’s left of the GOP base while enraging liberals (who call him “Phony Tony”) and lulling moderates to sleep. The message behind every word he spoke so pleasantly and almost robotically during the debate, is: I am a Republican. If you’re a Republican, I believe what you believe, but let’s not talk about it right now. It’s all the message he needs, for the moment, since he’s all but guaranteed a top-two finish in the primary and a smooth transition toward the general election. He’ll get there with his ideas unchallenged and his moneybags bursting with special-interest cash.

Brownley, on the other hand, came into the debate with a more complicated mission. A highly regarded state assemblywoman from Santa Monica who recently moved into Ventura County to establish a semblance of local bona fides, she spent a bit of her debate time kicking playfully at the three fellow Democrats nipping at her heels – but mostly she focused on arguing that she, and not the moderate Parks, has the best chance of vanquishing the dreaded Strickland in November. She did so by taking the most pugnacious stance among the candidates, at times railing against the Ryan budget and GOP policies on immigration and women’s issues with a vitriol that must work nicely in front of highly partisan audiences at rallies and fundraisers. Unfortunately for her, this audience was tilted rightward by the presence of several dozen Strickland volunteers – who felt no compunction about yelling “Liar!” and “Nonsense!” when Brownley hyperbolized GOP positions on contraception (no, they don’t really want to take away women’s right to use it) and Social Security (in fact, it’s the one area on which the Ryan budget mostly wimps out).

Interestingly, though, it wasn’t only the ruder members of the audience who called Brownley on her more grandiosely partisan moments. It was Parks, who – for all her flaws as a candidate, which will be discussed in a moment – is serving as the conscience of this race. In the presence of an independent, PAC-money-free candidate with a real shot at winning, Brownley’s over-the-top attacks on Republican policies made her seem smaller, not larger. Strickland, to his credit, recognized this – and even joined Parks in condemning the falsehoods in a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee mailer that had been sent the previous week. Every other candidate on the stage joined him in that criticism, save one – Brownley. She couldn’t, as it turns out, because she had another hit job on Parks at the printer under her own name, which arrived in my mailbox late last week.

Brownley did manage one effective moment — her closing statement, when she turned the tables on Parks’ pox-on-both-your-houses stance. “This is not about partisan bickering,” Brownley said. “This is about two very different visions and sets of values for our country. I am not going to run away from my party’s principles. I’m proud to be a Democrat!” Unfortunately, a Democrat is all Brownley seems to be at this point – like Strickland on the other side, she seems a walking, talking embodiment of major-party talking points, with little to recommend her apart from her guarantee to vote a particular way on every issue that arises.

For her own part, Parks’ debate performance reinforced the odd cocktail of schoolmarmishness and blow-up-the-system anarchy that characterized our interview a couple weeks ago. She has a healthy, if perhaps elevated, understanding of what a victory would mean — both for herself, as a Capitol Hill embodiment of Kevin Costner in that awful movie Swing Vote, and for our district, which she frequently urges to “make history” by pulling the lever for her. Unfortunately, as it is with Strickland and Brownley, Parks as a candidate so far works better in theory than in practice.

When an independent – even one like Parks, who has won every (nonpartisan) election she’s ever entered — launches a campaign without a natural ideological constituency, it behooves her to ladle out a hefty dollop of the common touch. A person in her position really needs to be able to ask voters, “Don’t you wish there were more people like me in Congress?” and get an enthusiastic response in the affirmative. But Parks is humorless, and something of a scold, as she delivers her critiques of Washington partisanship and corruption. “I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money,” she says at least six times an hour – but even when the next line out of her mouth is about doing the people’s work, the next line people take away seems to be, “… and doesn’t that make me better than everybody else, nyah nyah nyah.” Walking back toward my car, I must have heard at least three people say some version of, “I just don’t like that Linda Parks.”

Personally, I don’t know if I’d go that far – after all,  I do admire what Parks is trying to accomplish, and I have plenty of friends who are rather humorless (you probably don’t know who you are). But her above-it-all attitude (complete with occasional, Al Gore-style eye rolls) several times had me looking at the three “minor” candidates in the debate and wishing one of them would say, “Yeah, well, Linda, I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money, either – mostly because nobody’s offering it to me.”

As onlookers frequently wind up doing at these crowded-stage debates, I found my mind wandering from the frontrunners and looking to those “minor” candidates for inspiration. I discovered it in Jess Herrera. Unlike Brownley, who is a modern, keep-the-coalition-together Democrat who feels compelled to hit every liberal touchstone while trolling for female/ethnic/gay/older/younger/tree-hugging votes, Herrera is an old-school, New Deal Democrat. He found his calling among his fellow military grunts as a young man, and on the docks among his fellow longshoremen in the years that followed. Eventually he came to represent them on the Oxnard Harbor Commission – and he spent much of his debate time introducing voters to his background and offering concrete examples of the ways in which he has brought individuals, industry and government together to solve actual problems in a way that benefited each party.

His story was refreshing, his rhetoric honest and inspiring … his defense of his qualifications a withering rejection of the received wisdom about what type of person should go to Congress … and yet, of course, he has no chance of getting past the primary to the general election. He is, at best, a niche candidate – likely to appeal to Hispanics in the western part of the county, but to few others who make up the contemporary Democratic coalition. His best chance to keep his name in the news past June 6 is if he siphons off enough of the Hispanic vote to boost Parks past Brownley into the general election – and if that happens, as far as local and national Democrats are concerned, his name in the news will be “Mud.”

Brownley’s best chance of avoiding that fate is to barrage potential Parks supporters with negative information about her – an ugly task that she and the national Democratic Party have embraced whole- (if cold-) heartedly, resulting in a deluge of attack mailers that have been stacking up on my desk for the last two weeks. The next column in this series will discuss those mailers, the strategies and risks behind them, and the astonishing – and perhaps unprecedented, at least during a primary campaign — antagonism that has developed between Democrats and an independent who, when push comes to shove, shares most of their views.

For now, though, the race continues forward from the benchmark moment of last week’s debate. It’s certainly a race to watch – more than $1 million of national PAC money already attests to that – but I wish it was a race to love watching. It speaks volumes about the state of our politics that, in our county’s first-in-a-generation competitive congressional campaign, those few of us who are paying close attention have already felt our enthusiasm meters plummeting toward zero.

Arista Nashville

After Carrie Underwood won American Idol in 2005, she wanted to be marketed as a country singer, and she has been fabulously successful: 11 #1 country singles and three more that peaked at #2, plus three multi-platinum albums, with the new Blown Away released earlier this month. Her two best singles, “Before He Cheats” and “Wasted,” show two different sides of her—the sassy girl who won’t be mistreated and the powerful singer who can open up on a song like a firehose. Her latest single, “Good Girl,” tries to combine the two, but creates a vortex of suck that can only end up one of the World’s Worst Songs.

You know you’re in trouble within the first 15 seconds when you notice that “Good Girl” is slathered in Auto-Tune. I can’t tell if this is a production gimmick to give it a particular sheen or if it’s to keep Carrie in the right key. (Suggested motto for Auto-Tune: “Because professionals do it in one take, no matter what.”) About two-and-a-half minutes in, Carrie decides add extra sass by singing louder, blasting through the rest of the song like she was trying to demolish it. The first time I heard it I wondered, “Why is this person screaming at me?”

That “Good Girl” is considered a country song is a marketing decision, not a musical one. It’s country because the record label says it is, not because it has the remotest thing in common with country music. It’s not just Underwood who benefits from this, it’s much of Nashville these days—but it comes at the cost of un-mooring country from its history, and turning it from an organic art form into a plastic commodity. (We took a glance at this phenomenon in a Popdose post last month.)

But the thing that’s most annoying about “Good Girl” is the song’s emotional payoff line: “You better get to gettin’ on your goodbye shoes.” What are goodbye shoes?  Are they athletic shoes, so you can get away faster? Galoshes, so you can get away in the rain? Stilettos, for a sexy strut out the door? The amount of brainpower it took me to think up three examples of what goodbye shoes might be is vastly more than the concept deserves. “Goodbye shoes” is a hacky songwriter construction that sounds like imagery but paints no meaningful picture.

So for a lot of reasons both technical and aesthetic, one will rarely come across a record more objectionable than “Good Girl”—but it doesn’t matter. The record is poised to cross over from country to pop, and will likely become one of the biggest, broadest hits of Underwood’s career.

Lilith Fair? Great! Now all the doors are open for women! Well, they were, for a couple of years. Now rock radio is full of fifth-generation Eddie Vedder knockoffs while engaging women (other than Adele) can only manage cult followings. Men can strut around on stage until they quite literally drop dead, but Madonna is considered icky now that she’s past 50.

Women in Hollywood were summed up by the sage of our times, Stewie Griffin, when he lamented, “Chris, whatever happened to Geena Davis? She used to be in movies, but she’s not in movies anymore. She’s attractive enough but when she smiles you see too much gum.”

(Family Guy is, of course, remarkably catty toward plenty of women — Renee Zellweger, Helen Hunt, Minnie Driver, Cybill Shepherd, Sarah Jessica Parker, etc., etc. All perfectly attractive women in the real world but not in Seth MacFarlane’s, apparently.)

Fortunately, the “women in comedy” trend seems to have a bit more traction. Saturday Night Live may have permanently shed its boys-club image, years after disastrously misusing Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman and Laura Kightlinger. The Cheri Oteri/Molly Shannon/Ana Gasteyer era paved the way for a period in which Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch were the dominant voices on the show.

And while we may all wonder why Whitney Cummings needs two shows or why Laura Prepon is playing Chelsea Handler in a show that also features Chelsea Handler (What? Canceled? OK, then.), women certainly have it better in the dying world of prime-time comedy than they have in the past.

Like fellow Family Guy target Paul Reiser, women in comedy have turned literary. Tina Fey released Bossypants, and through circumstances too convoluted to describe here, I found myself reading Rachel Dratch’s book and The Office‘s Mindy Kaling’s book simultaneously.

Dratch’s road has been a bit bumpier than Fey’s or Kaling’s. After several terrific years on SNL, she was set to move on to 30 Rock with her old Second City buddy Fey. The execs reconsidered, and Dratch’s character was recast. Jane Krakowski took the character in a different direction, but the easiest thing for the media to notice was that Krakowski is blonder and skinnier.

The ensuing scrutiny wasn’t fair to anyone involved. Krakowski has done a brilliant job creating a character perfectly suited to the non-reality of 30 Rock. And Dratch certainly deserved better.

Dratch wastes little time getting to that part of her story in Girl Walks Into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle (Amazon), figuring that the readers want to know all about it. As all good comics must, she sees the humor in it. All of a sudden, she notices, people know who she is!

She hardly comes across as bitter, but it’s clear that her position on 30 Rock was uncomfortable. Rather than breaking away cleanly, she was kept around to play a variety of roles, as if she were a sketch comedy performer on a sitcom. In retrospect, we have to wonder why Fey and company didn’t simply give her another full-fledged part, perhaps in place of Judah Friedlander or one of the recurring TGS writer/performers.

But the 30 Rock situation is merely a prelude to a series of less publicized but equally funny/uncomfortable situations as she moves on in the dating scene and the comedy scene. Though she’s not destined to be a Hollywood starlet, she finds herself being asked out by people who just want to have a “celebrity” nearby.

The happy ending is the strangest twist yet. It’s not a conventional story of meeting the right guy and settling down. Instead, she has a light-hearted relationship with a good-hearted guy who isn’t perfect for her. That wouldn’t be noteworthy except for one thing — Dratch wound up pregnant.

Parents (yes, I’m talking to you, Jason Hare) will find her take on pregnancy and baby care funny and frighteningly familiar. Parenting comedy may have peaked with Bill Cosby’s early stand-up career, but Dratch offers the unique take of being pregnant several years after she had given up on the prospect. She also has a unique family situation — not exactly a single parent, not totally split apart from the father but not really together. She offers nothing but respect for her baby’s father and is moved to tears by a wonderful letter from his family, but she makes it clear that he’s not the Sully to her Denise.

And so the most surprising aspect of Dratch’s book is that the woman who gave us “Debbie Downer” has written something that, while never ceasing to be funny, ends up being sweet and tender.

Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (Amazon), covers some of the same territory. Like Dratch, Kaling was a nerdy kid who went to Dartmouth and found an outlet for her creativity through comedy. Some details in their stories overlap — Amy Poehler winds up appearing in both books, with Dratch and Kaling each admiring her take-charge personality.

And like Dratch, Kaling has dealt with some ridiculous perceptions of how she’s supposed to look. In Dratch’s case, she deals with media and casting directors who seem to think she’s some sort of small ogre. Kaling has a heart-breaking scene on a photo shoot in which someone shows up with clothes that would only fit Kate Moss.

Given her relative youth, Kaling doesn’t have as much of a story to tell about her own life. She had a relatively short wait before hitting it big as a writer and supporting character on The Office. She finished the book before the first big change in her career — NBC’s surely idiotic decision to let her walk off to Fox to develop her own show. (Seriously — look at the list of NBC’s new fall shows and name one you’d rather watch than Untitled Whatever Mindy Kaling Decides To Do Project.)

But Kaling fills the gap with a few good non-sequitur rants on reinventing TV and movies. Though she has known little but success, she sees the ironies and oddities of her business and is well-equipped to skewer them.

And she’s a more complex character than the publicity for this book might have you believe. She moves adroitly between being a superficial shopaholic and a hard-working, somewhat serious type who loves her parents and doesn’t get the concepts of “hooking up” or “one-night stands.”

If you have to choose between Kaling’s book and Dratch’s book, that choice might depend on your age and parenting status. Kaling speaks more to younger, career-oriented people. Dratch speaks for and toward those who have put kids above career, at least for now.

But both books are funny and provocative. And if we’re going to have a war on women, these books are a great way to know the enemy. Frankly, I’d rather fight on their side.

My last memories of Johnny came in the early 1990′s when he appeared to be out of touch with the times. Still in top form as a host, I saw him interview guests and appear to have little clue who they were or why they were on his show. I can recall Morrissey on the show as a musical guest and Carson, along with his guest, Bill Cosby, share an incredulous look as to why the teenage L.A. audience that night shrieked every time he mentioned Morrissey’s name. Carson retired in 1992, still a dominant force on television, still the place to be if you wanted to make a name for yourself. He went out on top and then he disappeared from the limelight.

For anyone who never saw Carson in his prime, especially people who were born into a television landscape with four or five late night talk show hosts, they may wonder what the big deal is about this one man. So what? He interviewed people and put on some skits- Leterman, Leno and Conan all do that. Hell, even Arsenio Hall was doing it before his show went off the air. What they don’t understand is that for 30 years, Carson was the only one. He was the destination place for actors, musicians and people with interesting lives to appear before the nation. For stand-up comedians especially, appearing on Carson and making the man laugh (or even better, having him call you to the couch for an interview) could make a career… the next day. What Jay,Dave, the Jimmy’s and Conan are all doing was perfected by Carson and they’re all indebted to him. That is just one of the points made in this compelling documentary from director Peter Jones, premiering on PBS tonight at 9 PM (check local listings) as a part of the network’s long running series, American Masters.

Carson was a notiriously private man, granting very few interviews in his lifetime (he died in 2005). Jones was granted unprecedented access to the late TV star’s personal and professional archives, including family photo albums, home movies, memorabilia and all existing episodes of Carson’s Tonight Show from 1962 until his retirement. He and his staff culled through over 4,000 episodes to compile a portrait of an enigma. While showing his brilliant talent as an entertainer, Jones also shows the complex personal life of Carson, warts and all. When he wasn’t on camera, Carson was a known womanizer, was married four times, had a distant relationship with his three sons (from his first wide), struggled with alcohol, and could seem aloof and cold. In what seems like an age old tale of Hollywood, Carson longed for the approval of his mother, whom he adored, yet she never paid him a compliment, even at the height of his success. Carson chose to let his work speak for itself and Jones found the clues to Carson’s life in the hours of footage when Carson was quite revealing about himself on camera.

Besides the great footage from every year of The Tonight Show, as well as clips from Carson’s early forays into television on CBS and ABC, Johnny Carson: King of Late Night  also features 45 interviews with performers who appeared on, or began their careers, on The Tonight Show. Included are Severinsen, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Bob Newhart and Steve Martin. Joan Rivers appears and discusses her famous falling with Carson after she went to start her own late night talk show. Drew Carey and Garry Shandling both get choked up when discussing Carson and the profound effect he had on their lives.

For anyone who grew up with Johnny, this documentary is like a visit with an old friend. The only thing that would make it better is if PBS were to air it at 11:30 PM.  For students of television unfamiliar with Carson’s place in the history of the medium and his rightful place as one of the most important pop culture figures in the 20th Century, Johnny Carson: King of Late Night is the ideal place to start learning about him and how he helped shape the way we watch television.

If you had to go away for awhile and you could only take five of your favorite albums with you, which ones would you choose? Yes, we know it isn’t a fair question, but that hasn’t stopped us from asking music fans who happen to be recording artists in their own right. This edition of Desert Island Discs comes courtesy of Bohème, whose latest LP, Follow the Freedom, is out now. You can hear music from the album below — after reading her Desert Island picks, of course!

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks

This is the perfect example of live-to-tape performance. No click on this bad boy! Listening to this album I’m totally transported to another place. Perfect for long drives and at-home hangouts. The playing is perfection, the vocals are haunting and the songs are classic Van. Listen with headphones if you want to really trip.

Tom Waits – Closing Time

What can I say about this album that would do it justice? It’s a master class in songwriting from beginning to end. And as well-sung an album as Tom Waits has ever produced, in my extremely humble opinion. “Martha” makes me cry every single time. My love affair with Mr. Waits spans decades, but it all began here.

Rickie Lee Jones – Rickie Lee Jones

That voice, the irreverence. A perfect mix of folk and street. She is the original hard candy with a soft center. Funk and soul meet white girl ’70s jive talk. Rickie can turn a phrase like no other. Hooks for days. This album is a classic.

The Rolling Stones – Hot Rocks 1964-1971

OK. You know why this is awesome, right?

The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong on Verve

All I’m saying is, as a singer you must kneel at the altar of Ella. As a performer who wishes to distinguish, Louis Armstrong broke the mold. And as a songwriter, it behooves you to look back to move forward.

Follow the Freedom is the debut album from Bohème, a name taken by Cassidy Catanzaro, an established and acclaimed musician, singer, songwriter, producer and entrepreneur, to mark a new chapter in her career, and in her life.

From late 1999 to early 2008, Cassidy was the frontwoman and primary songwriter in Antigone Rising. After releasing four independent albums, the all-female rock band was signed to Lava/Atlantic Records, and its 2005 major label debut From the Ground Up sold upwards of 500,000 copies.

Celebrated for the excitement of her live performances, Cassidy toured/played shows with the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Dave Matthews, Rob Thomas, The Allman Brothers, Macy Gray, Raphael Saadiq, Charice & Norah Jones.

I can’t believe it’s already been a year since we saw Ell/Nikki become the first winners for Azerbaijan, that country whose name you don’t know how to pronounce and probably aren’t able to identify on a map (let me help you: it is located in the eastern part of the South Caucasus, at the western coast of the Caspian Sea and borders on Russian Federation in the North, Georgia in the North-West, Armenia and Turkey in the West and South-West, and Iran in the South). Since Azerbaijan won last year, they will be hosting this year (the contest will take place in the capital city of Baku), so now you have the perfect opportunity to read up on the country and its culture. I also recommend you become familiar with the show’s three hosts, Nardiz, Eldar, and Leyla.

This year’s contest moves back to its typical timeframe of late May (it was in early may last year). The first semi-final round, featuring 18 of the 42 competing countries (it was 43, but, sadly, Armenia dropped out) is scheduled for Tuesday, May 22 at 9:00 P.M. CET (3:00 P.M. EDT). The second semi-final, which happens on Thursday, May 24 at 9:00 P.M. CET (3:00 P.M. EDT), will have another 18 competitors. And the Saturday, May 26 final, which happens at 9:00 P.M. CET (3:00 P.M. EDT), will contain the countries that made it past the semi-finals, plus the six countries that are not required to compete in the semis (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, U.K., Azerbaijan). BBC America still hasn’t seen fit to take a few days off from running Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns to air Eurovision, so if you live in the U.S., you’ll have to watch via the Eurovision website.

So, what will the 2012 Song Contest have to offer, besides the chance to practice saying “Azerbaijan”? Plenty. The crop of contestants this year is possibly my favorite in all the years I’ve been watching Eurovision, and by favorite I mean the  most crazypants — and not just because Engelbert Humperdinck will be representing the U.K.

Because I am a professional, I have watched all 42 participant videos (something I highly recommend you also do) and I am now prepared to share with you my picks of the contestants I think are the most ridiculous, have the best chance of winning, or have a song I might actually like. Just like every year, I have already chosen a guilty pleasure: the song from Ukraine, performed by what I’m guessing is that country’s Beyoncé.

OK, here we go. These are in alphabetical order, by country. I split the post up into three pages so as not to assault your browsers.

Austria: Trackshittaz, “Woki Mit Deim Popo”

Denmark: Soluna Samay, “Should’ve Known Better”

Georgia: Anri Jokhadze, “I’m a Joker”

Greece: Eleftheria Eleftheriou, “Aphrodisiac”

Ireland: Jedward, “Waterline” (Jedward were my favorite last year and I’m very excited to see them return.)