jguyreview

"Twenty Feet From Stardom" review

2014-09-06T10:00:00.001-07:00

The documentary film, Twenty Feet From Stardom does for back-up singers what The Wrecking Crew did for studio musicians. People whose names you don't know, yet whose musical talents you have heard on thousands of songs, finally get recognition.

Merry Clayton. Lisa Fischer. Tata Vega. Claudia Lennear.

They're not household names, but you've been hearing their voices for decades. They've sung back-up for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, T. Rex, David Bowie, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Sting and a plethora of others. Darlene Love and her girl group, the Blossoms, talk about backing every one from James Brown to Buck Owens.

There have always been back-up singers as the film shows. We see black and white '50s footage of Perry Como accompanied by old fashioned-styled female singers sounding safely sanitized and whiter than a Lawrence Welk show.

Then around the early '60s a buoyant new sound took the world. Young, beautiful, black singers, many of them, preachers' daughters, went beyond the sheet music and created something vibrant and exhilarating.
In several interviews, Bruce Springsteen, who was highly inspired by that music, credits the influence of the black church in creating a sound that would be secularized and turn up on records and radio.

Claudia Lennear

In my favorite part of the film, they talk about the irresistible Phil Spector Wall of Sound. Springsteen talks about the ingredient that, probably more than any other, gave the music its freshness and vitality. The singers were young. Still in their teens or just barely out of them. They had youthful energy and it came through in their records.

Twenty Feet From Stardom features dazzling footage of such artists as Ray Charles and the Raylettes, Ike and Tina Turner with a sexy performance by the Ikettes and David Bowie and a chorus of singers performing a highly energetic performance of "Young Americans."

But, as the film brings out, it's not all glamour. There's a business side that's often unfair, harsh and leads to a lot of disappointment. Love was hoping to break into a solo career, recording "He's a Rebel," but the record was credited to the Crystals. The second song Love and her Blossoms recorded - "He's Sure the Boy I Love," also credited to the Crystals.

Several back-up singers, just as talented as the big names they sing for, have tried their hands at solo careers. Merry Clayton, who provided the haunting backgrounds to the Rolling Stones' "Gimmie Shelter," had a voice as powerful as Aretha Franklin's. By all accounts, she should have been a superstar.

However, as the film brings out, there are unique pressures that come with being a solo artist. The record company may, or may not, promote the artist. The singer has to have the kind of ego that drives solo performing and self-promotion.

Lisa Fischer, a back-up singer who broke through with a Grammy winning album, admits she's not good at self-promotion. She's gone back to back-up singing.

Judith Hill, who sang back-up for Michael Jackson and found national acclaim singing "We Are the World" at his funeral, is featured singing with several older, veteran back-up singers. She was a contestant on The Voice a couple of seasons back. Didn't win. Hasn't broken through on her dream of being a solo artist. Yet she's known and respected by people like Elton John.

Not every back-up singer, however, has dreams of individual
stardom. As the film brings out, many are comfortable being in the background. They like the thrill of performing on stage with huge names one night, then walking anonymously along the street the next day.

Merry Clayton and Tata Vega

It's a tough business, showing no signs of easing up. Record companies, trying to save money, are increasingly steering away from using back-up singers. I hope that doesn't catch on. These people add spice and texture to music. They liven it up.

Watching this film and entering the world of back-up singers, I've developed empathy for them. These people aren't rich and famous. They just live in the orbits of the rich and famous. They have a skill set they need to get paid for. Back-up singing is their livelihood and I would hate to see the jobs dry up.

Twenty Feet From Stardom engenders respect for people whose talents have for too long been unheralded. See it and come away hearing back-up vocals with new ears.

I liked this song from Twenty Feet From Stardom. It's great to hear on vinyl the way God intended for us to listen to music.

When Judith Hill auditioned for The Voice, the chairs of every judge turned around. Cool song. Confident, professional performer. Let's hope she achieves her aspirations.

A highlight of the Late Show With David Letterman is the annual Christmas performances by Darlene Love singing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." Here is her latest performance from 2013.

Gateway Films

The Wrecking Crew - A must see documentary about the unsung musicians who played on the biggest hits of the '60s. It's been called the best documentary about the recording scene.

The T.A.M.I. Show - A black and white concert film from 1964. I mentioned Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. The Ronnette's performance of "Be My Baby" is heavenly. You've got to see the performances - James Brown, Chuck Berry, a young Rolling Stones...

This Is It - He was the consummate performer. Michael Jackson's posthumously released documentary was the last creative statement of his career. He sings duets with Judith Hill.

That's the Way it Is - The ultimate solo artist. This 1970 documentary of Elvis Presley in rehearsal and on the Las Vegas stage was recently re-mastered. He has great rapport with his musicians and back-up singers.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars review

2014-08-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

For Paul Martin

David Bowie's monumental, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released 42 years ago - the same amount of time Elvis Presley was on earth. And yet, after all the hook-up spasms of the past have come and flamed out, after glam rock has crashed and burned more than once and the old shock, awe and even discussion of Bowie's androgyny have become mute, what remains is expert musicality, a fixed hard rock achievement. Ziggy Stardust is in the cannon, a desert island listen that belongs in the library files of rock alongside Sgt. Pepper's sticky fingers.

Bowie put years of influences into this thematically conceived album - rock and rollers, years spent in avant garde theatrical training, experimentations, novelties. It all took shape with something original. Here is the concept: the earth is running out of natural resources and will self-destruct in five years. Meanwhile, an outer space alien takes human form and comes to earth with a message of hope and love through music. He becomes a rockstar, adored and loved to death by fans, yet lonely and isolated. Unable to find true love, he lives out excess and rock n' roll headonism - the whole sex, drugs and rock n' roll ride - until he self-destructs beneath the weight of it all.

Ziggy Stardust is an album that couldn't be made today. Nobody would believe it. But 1972 was smack in the Golden Age of Rock when your Mick Jaggers, your Robert Plants and any one of your ex-Beatles reigned bigger than life. The idea of a rock n' roll messiah was easier to grasp. Today, we get an occasional break-out star like a Lady Gaga. And there's respectable groups and musicians. We all know Jack White. We all know he rocks like voodoo meets John the Revelator, but the rock pinnacle as it was known in an era so close to the Beatles & Stones - that's not happening in today's fragmented world.

But any bar band could take any one of the songs from Ziggy and make rock gold out of it. This stuff never gets old. Rick Wakeman may have played on one cut from this album - "It Ain't Easy - just as he had for some tracks in Bowie's Hunky Dory, but this album is no pretentious trip, no Yes or The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Musically, the greatest thing about the Ziggy Stardust album was the way Bowie melded the heavy metal of his 1970 Man Who Sold the World album and the pop of his 1971 Hunky Dory album.

Bowie's band was Mick Ronson on guitar, Nick Bolder on bass and Mick Woodmansey on drums.

"Five Years," the first track on the album has a kind of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band "Working Class Hero" bent with its apocalyptic aura and despondency. There's a beauty in the cinematic lyrics, the morose images of opera houses, telephones, ice cream parlors.

A soldier with a broken arm fixed his stare into the wheels
of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest
and a queer threw up at the sight of that

The next song, "Soul Love," is my favorite track from Ziggy. There is a beautiful psychedelic melody, a taste of fresh new love between a boy and a girl, but poignantly, the singer can't share this love with somebody. He has only the idea of love.

Inspirations have I none
just to touch the flaming dove
all I have is my love of love
and love is not loving

The idea of space alien as rockstar first takes root in the hard rocking "Moonage Daydream." He sings: "I'm an alligator...I'll be a rock n' roll bitch for you." The idea builds in the Elton John-like, gender-bending "Lady Stardust" and "Star" where Bowie says he could make all the bad things all right "as a rock n' roll star." He could find love, he thinks, in the church of rock n' roll.

My second favorite song on the album is the title track, "Ziggy Stardust," - the album's grittiest tune, yet with sad and beautiful soul poppish touches to go with the rock. The song captures this bizarre, rock mutant at the zenith of his power with decadence and downfall approaching. The line about Ziggy playing guitar left-handed was a veiled reference to Jimi Hendrix, which is pretty cool.

The rocking "Suffragette City" shows that rock n roll was just what the parents feared in the 50s: sex. "This mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of place."

There are signs on this album of the the late '70s punk and new wave to come, while Bowie shows a subtle awareness of traditional black soul, which he would later show splendidly on his 1975 Young Americans album.

Eventually, the whole Ziggy Stardust persona would reach such a level of grandiosity that Bowie, would have to kill it. He had to save himself and the character he'd perfected from becoming a one-note novelty act. It made prophetic the "Ziggy Stardust" line, "When the kids killed the man, I had to break up the band."

Bowie is a musical chameleon. He left the androgyny phase decades ago. He's still recording and he's always into something new. Ziggy Stardust, however was his signature album, a work he will be known for. It deserves many spins around your turn table.

David Bowie - he'll be a rock n' roll bitch for you.

England was dreary, living in the shadow of the Second World War, a post-empire, post Beatles world. Then Bowie appeared on the BBC in this spacey, androgynous performance, answering the question, "What's next?"

Bowie and his band recorded an unreleased version of this old Chuck Berry rocker at the beginning of the Ziggy Stardust recordings. It's wonderful to hear this song on record and experience it the way English kids like John Lennon, David Bowie and Keith Richards experienced it.

Bowie based much of the Ziggy character on English rocker Vince Taylor. Bowie met Taylor after he'd had a mental breakdown and believed himself to be a cross between a god and an alien.

Without Bowie, there would be no Lady Gaga.

Gateway music

David Bowie took the name Ziggy from the name of a tailor shop he passed on a train. He liked the way it rhymed with Iggy as in Iggy Pop. Check out Iggy and the Stooges.

I referenced John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album. You've gotta hear it. It was Lennon's magnum opus.

The Rolling Stones rough-edged Exile on Main Street was released in 1972, the same year as Ziggy Stardust. One of rock's greatest albums, it belongs in your collection.

"The Fire Next Time" review

2014-07-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

At the height of the Civil Rights Era in 1963, James Baldwin's passionate examination of racism, The Fire Next Time appeared on the literary scene. This book was born out of pain and urgency. Baldwin was writing from a deep place. Written with Biblical language and incendiary prose, Baldwin makes the reader feel the torment and anguish of living black in an American society - founded on - and dominated by white supremacy.

This deceptively slim book is divided into two essays - "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind." They were published in The Progressive and the New Yorker, respectively.

"You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many was as possible, that you were a worthless human being," he writes in a letter to his 14-year-old nephew, also named James.

In the second essay, Baldwin describes how as a teenager, he escaped the streets of Harlem by taking refuge in the church and becoming a popular boy preacher. He later became disenchanted with the church's hypocrisy. Years later, as a journalist, he met the charismatic Elijah Muhammad and observed the separatist movement of black Muslims. He resisted the group's attempts to convert him and while he empathized with is men and women, he found their dream of establishing their own separate nation to be impractical and unrealistic.

The only answer he finds is for blacks and whites to come together. But to do that, whites need to take a hard, uncomfortable look at themselves and their culture. We need to make a self-examination and have an honest conversation about race. More than 50 years after this book was written, we have failed to do that.

I can tell you most of my fellow white people take the evasive view that talking about problems makes them worse. We like to pretend racism is a problem of the past that was resolved decades ago during the Civil Rights Movement. When minorities speak out against the systemic and personal racism that still exists in our society, too many whites cast it off as "minorities bitching again."

James Baldwin

Baldwin brings out the truth - that our nation, society, religion and culture are predicated on the mythology that the black man is inferior and the white man is superior and God-ordained. The Western world was founded on the idea that the black man is a descendant of Ham and thereby, cursed and predestined to be a slave.

Right-wing zealots take umbrage over any measure of criticism leveled at America. They will respond aggressively to Baldwin's harsh critiques of our country' and the mythology, the great lie that our nation is exceptional and blessed by God above all others - a belief used for centuries to justify imperialism, conquest, barbarism, genocide and the destruction of non-white skinned people.

In some of his most powerful prose, Baldwin calls out the Christian church for its complicity in perpetuating the violent mythology of America and the Western world. He writes:

"The Christian church itself - again, as distinguished from some of its ministers - sanctioned and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God."

Yet while Baldwin walked away from the church and all religion as a young man, he was never able to shake its power and influence over his life and creative spirit. He learned to write, preaching from the pulpit. His writing is suffused with the fervor, cadence and literary style of the Bible. There is an urgent, apocalyptic bent to his words, reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets.

The book's apocalyptic title is taken from an old slave song: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time. Baldwin was saying that the destinies of white and black were interwoven and their failure to come together as one nation would mean mutual destruction for both. The riots and assassinations that were to come in the '60s renders Baldwin's words to be prophecy.

Unquestionably, The Fire Next Time was an epochal book - indispensable '60s literature. Yet the racism Baldwin spoke of, the toxicity and hatred, are holding us down today. Still. You can find it all over Facebook and Fox "News." We need to rediscover Baldwin's voice. We need a voice like that.

Now.

Gateway literature:

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr., also written in 1963. This series of sermons by the late Civil Rights icon equate human rights with Christian love. In essays, such as "A Knock at Midnight," King, like Baldwin, speaks of the interwoven destinies of blacks and whites.

In some of his speeches, King mentioned Baldwin's name alongside such gigantic black literary names as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. All are worth reading.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. 1963 was a year of brilliant, forceful literature. This Cold War era satire about a nuclear holocaust contains vast truths about humanity.

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. In his breakthrough 1953 autobiographical novel, Baldwin writes about a teenager's religious awakening and subsequent moral, spiritual and sexual struggle. In this book, Baldwin gave a novelistic treatment to topics that he would write about as true life events 10 years later in The Fire Next Time.

"Picnic" review

2014-04-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

It was sexy, sultry, hot and sticky as the cotton slipping from the cypress trees of Riverside Park as summer gave way to fall in some backwater Kansas town.

One look at the DVD box and you can see it. The muscular leading man, his shirt torn almost clean off, casting lovemaking eyes on the looker in a pink dress. Hot stuff for 1955. That's the year Picnic was released in theaters.

Picnic is a classic '50s story, a look at life 60 years ago. The protagonist is in the Brando/James Dean/Elvis mold. He's the outsider who descends on a sleepy little town and starts shaking things up.

William Holden plays the drifter, Hal Carter, who arrives in town, riding in a box car. He plans to look up an old college buddy, Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson) whose family is wealthy and owns a fleet of grain elevators. Hal harbors unrealistic expectations. Thinks he can just drop in on an old friend and get set up in an office with a secretary. Be a big man behind a big desk on a big phone, making deals on Enterprise.

He scraps some change together, doing yard work for a sweet old lady, Mrs. Potts (Verna Fenton). She's a motherly woman, feeding him breakfast and washing his dirty shirt while he works, barechested, in her back yard and catches the eyes of the women next door - one of whom, Madge Owens (Kim Novak), is Alan's girlfriend. Madge's mother, Flo (Betty Field) finds Hal dangerous and there's something to that.

When he shows up on Alan's spacious lawn, it's a happy, backslapping reunion between old college roommates and fraternity brothers. They reminisce about old times, Alan shows Hal his family's grain elevators, takes him to the local swimming pool and brings him along to the Labor Day town picnic.

That's where the friendship starts to cool. Alan grows weary of Hal's blustery big talking and suggests in front of the others picnicking that Hal can get a job in his elevators - as a grain scooper. Then there's another thing that drives the friends apart - the classic wedge driver.

She stands lean, tall and perky - her big eyes set on something other than dime stores, tea parties and Kansas grain. Madge, Alan's girl.

Her mother is pushing her toward the easy life. Get crowned Miss Neewoallah (Halloween spelled backwards), marry Alan and it's lunch at the country club and Bridge parties for the rest of her life. She'll be taken care of.

It's like she tells her daughter: "You're 19, then 20 and 21. Then you're 40 and an old maid." Picnic portrays well the dead end life that awaited women at that time in that culture. It's not a life that Madge really wants. She seems lukewarm and reticent in her relationship with Alan. Then Hal comes along and lights her fire.
Hal and Madge dance together at the picnic and it falls into the category of sexy with clothes on.

Meanwhile, Alan calls the police and reports the car he let Hal borrow is stolen. He's angry and it has nothing to do with the car. Hal has been out for hours with Madge. When he arrives back at Alan's home with the car, he gets into an unrealistic looking scuffle with the police and speeds off with the car.

After losing the cops and leaving the car behind, he looks up Madge, tells her he's hopping a freight to Tulsa in the morning and begs her to meet him there. Tells her he has a job waiting for him as a hotel belhop. These two are mad for each other. "I love you, I gotta have you," Hal tells her. The two may be lovers (we can easily surmise that they made love; Hollywood didn't show the act back then) but they're not really in love. They're in lust.

The movie ends with Madge taking a bus bound for Tulsa. It's impetuous, her going after this shiftless man whom she'd just met, a man with a rap sheet. Somehow, I don't get the feeling they're going to live happily ever after in Oklahoma.

Then again, Madge needs to get the hell away from her stultifying small town Kansas life. She needs to go out and make a life for herself. In those days before women's liberation, this man, this rebel, offers her the excuse she needs to get away.

Novak was believable as the 19-year-old small town beauty queen. As for Holden's role, I wasn't buying it. He did great with what he was given, playing the swaggering roughneck, but Holden, who was around 37 at the time, looked too old to pass for a guy a few years out of college.

Of all the actors in the film, there's no question who turned in the greatest performance. That honor would go to Rosalind Russell as Rosemary Sydney, the "old maid schoolteacher" who boards in the Owens' house. She puts on airs, talking about the men who are supposedly in love with her and how she has no time for them. Inside, she's lonely, desperate and repressed.

A fortyish woman, Rosemary wants the youth, beauty and sex appeal that Hal and Madge have. Drunk on her date, Howard's, whisky, she shamelessly throws herself at Hal. Then, realizing she's made a fool out of herself, Rosemary lashes out verbal abuse at Hal. Later, she has another meltdown when she begs Howard Bevans (Arthur O'Connell) to marry her. She's vulnerable, emotionally fragile and pathetic.

Russell refused to be nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actress category. If not for her refusal, she may have clenched it.

Filmed in Kansas, Picnic has that middle America at American mid-century feel. I love the way the director, Joshua Logan, interspersed documentary-like footage of townsfolk at the picnic with scenes of the film's stars. It made me wonder if Logan had ever directed documentaries, but there's nothing in his biographies to suggest he did.

The small town feel takes the movie to the heart of what playwright William Inge was going for when he wrote the original play, Picnic, which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. (Logan directed the Broadway stage production as well as the film.)

While scandalous for its day, the film is tame by today's standards. It's not a perfect film, but it's worth taking a look at this portal into a time when men wore suits and ties and women wore gorgeous dresses to small town celebrations. Picnic is a slice of Americana pie in a park with a band shelter and pavilion.

The film is mostly forgotten today. But as long as boxcar loneliness and small town yearnings - the heat - exists, Picnic will have a home on community theater and high school stages across America.

Gateway films: Inge also wrote other plays that were made into movies, such as Come Back Little Sheba and Bus Stop, which was also directed by Logan. He also directed such films as Mister Roberts and South Pacific. All are worth a look.

Check out Rosalind Russell in the 1958 comedy, Auntie Mame.

It's too bad that Kim Novak is now only known to younger audiences as the woman with all the ridiculous plastic surgery who introduced Matthew McConaughey at this year's Academy Awards. In the '50s, she was one of the hottest things going. Check her out with Jimmy Stewart in the 1958 Alfred Hitchock directed psychological thriller, Vertigo.

And while on the subject of actresses once hot, still alive, but largely forgotten, I have to recommend the Hitchcock spy thriller, North by Northwest. The film starred Eva Marie Saint with Cary Grant and James Mason.

I first saw Picnic around 20 years ago on TCM (or was it the old American Movie Classics) when today's stars introduced their favorite old films. Brooke Shields picked Picnic. Rosanne Barr and then husband Tom Arnold picked the much classier Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford in The Way We Were. Country singer Travis Tritt showed Elvis's Jailhouse Rock and Kenny Rogers presented Oklahoma.

All, all are worth seeing.

"The Beatles" review

2014-02-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

If you're going to load up this year, reading Beatles biographies - and 2014 would be a great year to do that - this is the book to start with. It's not the greatest written book on the fabs or the most brutally honest, but it's the progenitor of all Beatle bios to follow. - The Beatles by Hunter Davies.

Davies wrote the book around late 1967 and early '68. John Lennon would later dismiss Davies's book as "watered down" and there is some truth to that. Still, this book, albeit an authorized biography was the first to break through the Beatle bubble and begin the unraveling of the cold, unvarnished truth. It was the first book to address their rough childhoods, the band's pill popping days, playing in the red light district of Hamburg, Germany, the controversial firing of Pete Best and how Dylan turned them on to marijuana.

To get the Beatle experience in print form, this book is a window. Like pot was a window for Rubber Soul and acid for Revolver, this book is - well, it's not that mystical of a portal, but it is an essential entryway. But be aware. Do not get one of the revised editions of this book. Get the original version, published in September of 1968. Check it out from your local library, interlibrary loan it if your hometown library does not have it, buy it in a used bookstore or off eBay, but if you're going to read the book, read the original copy.

The magic of this book is not the stories it tells. Revelatory for their time, those stories are common knowledge today. Davies' book stands out, not for what it reveals, but for the perspective from which it was written. It came out when the Beatles were still young, somewhat naïve and contemporary, churning out hit singles and getting played on Top 40 radio.

For all anybody knew, the Beatles would still be making music together for years. Davies described the four as "umbillically connected" and they talked as if there was no end in sight.

Furthermore, John was still married to Cynthia, George was still married to Patti, Ringo to Maureen and Paul was engaged to Jane Asher.

Who knew that in two years, the band would be broken up? That John would leave Cynthia for Yoko and Paul would be married to Linda and have a ready-made family?

Early Beatles. Davies' biography was the first to tell of the band's wild days in Hamburg, Germany. It was the first book to talk about John's art school friend, Stu Sutcliffe, who joined the band, left them and died before they became famous. Davies interviewed Sutcliffe's lover, German artist, Astrid Kirchherr, who took this photograph.

Sometimes when reading such things as John and Cyn's exchanges, there is a tinge of sadness because we know how it will end. On the surface, they seemed to have a happy marriage. In hindsight, the book reveals signs that John's marriage was in trouble. In the shadow of her rockstar husband, Cyn felt unfulfilled. She should have been working on her art and teaching like she wanted to be doing. He should have encouraged her. She wanted to live a quieter family existence with John and Julian. He wanted - at least at that time; it would end quickly - to be constantly surrounded by "our Beatle buddies." Cyn said she did not think she and John would have stayed together if she hadn't gotten pregnant. As for the Beatles worldwide fame?

Sometimes I wish it all never happened, she said.

Of the four Beatles John resonated the most with me because he had the most contradictions. He was the most mercurial of the four and his life appeared to be the one most in limbo. Davies did not go into John's drug addiction, but reading between the lines, it's there.

The book also hints about the group's manager, Brian Epstein homosexuality, without coming out with it. He was described ambiguously as a "gay bachelor." There is a flat denial that Brian's death was suicide. Davies quotes people who maintain strongly that his death was an accidental overdose of pills, but it's hard not to be skeptical.

George comes across as the Beatle who has "grown the most" and "needs the others the least." The most materialistic of the band mates in his youth, he put those worldly concerns to the side when he embraced Eastern religion. It's interesting that while George was uncomfortable with being a celebrity, his family enjoyed it. His parents judged beauty contests and his mother answered fan mail, as did Ringo's wife, Maureen.

That's part of the fun of this book. Not only were all four Beatles still alive, most of their parents were as well. Paul's father seems much like the old, distinguished English gentleman we perceive Paul to be now. Also, it's interesting that George's father, Harold Harrison, continued working as a bus driver even after his son became a world famous millionaire.

Davies' book was written from the perspective of the Beatles having reached a plateau. The story had a neat, tidy ending. But things were forever changing in the Beatles world (despite that line in "Across the Universe") and this book was almost out of date as soon as it came off the presses. Only three months after its publication, John and Yoko would be appearing nude on the cover of Rolling Stone.

There is a certain innocence about the book as it gives a last look at the Beatles before the changes set into motion that would split the band apart and into history.

Gateway literature

Having read Hunter Davies' biography, the next logical step is to read the biographies, Shout: The Beatles and their Generation by Phillip Norman and The Beatles: A Biography by Bob Spitz. You might as well continue the journey.

I chose this video from Lennon's solo career because you see him hanging out with Miles Davis. Only a few years earlier, John is quoted in Davies' book, saying, "We're very anti-jazz. I think it's shit music."

"Bonnie and Clyde" review

2014-01-31T03:59:00.001-08:00

I didn't watch the A&E version of Bonnie and Clyde for the same reason I refused to watch remakes of Hairspray, The Shining and Footloose.

You can't top the original.

The big screen version of Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 was ground breaking, provocative and iconoclastic. This depiction of the infamous 1930s bank robbers struck the chord of 1960s counter culture with its themes of youthful rebellion, sexual freedom and senseless murder mirroring the casualties in Vietnam.

There was an amoral aspect to the film. Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) were bank robbers and murderers, yet we liked them and sympathized with them. The anti-hero is all over the edgy TV fare of today, but for 1960s movie audiences, used to Hollywood's old Hays Production Code, it was heavy stuff.

But those old ways were unraveling. Bonnie and Clyde reflected that.

Bonnie and Clyde were not even portrayed as dark characters. They were kind of goofy, likable and capricious. Clyde was a bumbling bank robber. For much of the film, he was impotent, telling Bonnie, "I ain't no loverboy." Yet, there was something smooth about him. In Beatty's hands...he had style. As Bonnie, Faye Dunaway was alluring. Totally smokin' hot and a tease. When she caresses Clyde's handgun, it stands in for a phallus, one of many phallic symbols in the film.

If a celluloid version of Bonnie and Clyde were made today, there would probably be graphic sex scenes. This film didn't need that. It captured the groove of the '60s sexual revolution on suggestion, alone.

Parts of the movie were fictional. For example, Bonnie didn't meet Clyde when he was trying to steal her mother's car as depicted in the movie. But that's okay. Screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton wanted to tell a story and create a cinematic mood.

Director Arthur Penn shot the film primarily around rural back roads and primitive towns in the Dallas, Texas area that looked like the 1930s. Some scenes were shot in actual banks that the real Bonnie and Clyde robbed. There was a Grapes of Wrath feel to the story and scenery. In one scene, Clyde Barrow talks to a farmer whose home has been foreclosed by the bank. A view of the man's wife and child inside the truck looks like a Walker Evans photograph.

The 1930s Steinbeckian quality is there, casting banks as corrupt and against the poor folk. While robbing a bank, Clyde gives a farmer back the money the man had just given him - something that really happened. In a scene where they subdue a Texas ranger, Frank Hamer, played by Denver Pyle, Clyde tells him, "You oughta be helpin' poor folks instead of chasin' after us."

While it depicted the '30s and spoke to the nation's nostalgia for the era, the theme of non-conformists striking at The Establishment resonated with '60s culture. It was a moment short-lived.

Throughout the movie, there was a sense of doom hanging over the heads of Bonnie and Clyde. When they talked about the normal life they would live when this Depression was over, about what they would do differently if they were starting over, we know - they know - their ride is almost over. Reality sets in from the first moment Clyde kills a man and becomes more vivid, the deeper his gang gets in its crime spree.

The chaos that would come to consume the troubled lives of Bonnie and Clyde in their final days mirrored the societal breakdown, the violent, grenade throwing culture of the late '60s. Clyde's brother, Buck, (Gene Hackman) gets shot in the face. We see the blood, hear him in pain, hear the cacophonous screams of his wife Blance (Estelle Parsons) and Bonnie. Their dreams were dying, just as America's dream of living up to its ideals was disintegrating into violence and mass confusion.

When the gang visits Bonnie's mother, the scenes are shot slow motion with hazy, far away tones. We sense it's one last homecoming, a sad farewell.

From a Freudian aspect, it's noteworthy that when Clyde is finally able to make love to Bonnie, it's only after she has written a poem, published in the newspapers, predicting their demise. "...but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde." It speaks to what Freud called our subconscious desire for sex and death.

The violence had something audiences hadn't seen before in movies.
It looked real. We're desensitized to violence today and we've lost touch with reality. But in 1967, it was shocking to see someone's face bloodied and flesh torn from gunshot wounds. I would say the graphic violence was warranted. Here were the consequences revealing how far the Barrow gang had fallen.

Also, the violence and deaths were timely. People were watching dead soldiers every night on the evening news. The film was a commentary on Vietnam where young men in the bloom of life were being brutally cut down. I'm sure there were right wing reactionaries at the time, cheering on the war -"blow em' to kingdom come" - while piously decrying the "immorality and violence" in Hollywood and popular culture. The audience member turned on to reality would see the connection.

A film that captures the zeitgeist of its time deserves to be watched and studied in any era. I really can't speak for the remake because I haven't seen it and don't care to, but I doubt that film students will be discussing it 40 or 50 years from now. The 1967 version may not be the definitive history, but it is the definitive film about Bonnie and Clyde.

This classic from Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs was played at various times in Bonnie and Clyde. It was anachronistic as the story was set in 1931 and the song wasn't recorded until 1948 or '49. Still, the old timey sound complemented the film and the action well.

Gateway movies

Bonnie and Clyde was influenced by French New Wave style of filmmakers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Check out their work in films like: Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim and Breathless.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? - I read that impotence was a common theme in films from the 1960s. Obviously, I have to see more 60s films. I do know it was a theme in this Mike Nichols directed black comedy-drama about a drunken, volatile night at the home of a professor (Richard Burton) and his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) as they entertain a younger couple, (George Segal) and (Sandy Denis). Excellent film

The French Connection - Gene Hackman won a best actor Oscar for his role as a New York City police detective. Roy Schneider played his partner. Based on a true story and a book, the two stumble on an international heroin smuggling operation and try to track down the source. The film won the best picture Oscar for 1971.

Chinatown - This 1974 film directed by Roman Polanski starred Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Jack Nicholson. A critique of greed and corruption, the story was based on California's "water wars" - disputes over water rights. The film revived the noir style of the 1940s.

Natural Born Killers - There were scenes in Bonnie and Clyde showing the pair as folk heroes, glorified in the press. It reminded me of this disturbing, controversial Oliver Stone film from 1994, starring Woody Harrelson and Juliet Lewis, as two young lovers who murder people and become mass media celebrities.

Gateway literature

I would be remiss not to recommend James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

"The Most Dangerous Man in America" review

2013-12-30T04:38:00.000-08:00

I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions. . . . (From Daniel Ellsberg’s TV interview with Walter Cronkite) http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/transcript-of-cronkites-interview-of-me-just-after-the-pentagon-papers-came-outhttp://www.ellsberg.net/archive/transcript-of-cronkites-interview-of-me-just-after-the-pentagon-papers-came-out

I was in college majoring in journalism, taking a Media Law class when I learned about the Pentagon Papers case – one of the most important cases ever decided by the Supreme Court. Tricky Dick Nixon tried to suppress publication of leaked documents about the Vietnam War, but fortunately the high court ruled in favor of the Constitution.

The 40th anniversary of the case brought the Pentagon Papers in the news again. At long last, the government has declassified the entire collection – more than 7,000 documents telling the dirty truth about how four U.S. presidents helped create a war that needlessly ended 58,000 American and 2 million Vietnamese lives.

Daniel Ellsberg, a defense dept. analyst, leaked the Top Secret documents to the press. The court ruled against prior restraint, saying the government could not stop newspapers from publishing the classified papers. While I understood the impact of this decision – a triumph for First Amendment rights -- I knew next to nothing about Ellsberg. I learned that Nixon’s plumbers ransacked his psychiatrist’s office and that’s about it.

This week’s news prompted me to finally watch the 2009 documentary film, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. The film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, educated me about Ellsberg and gave me new insight into this historical drama and its relevance today. POV’s (that’s cinema speak for “Point of View”) website, http://www.pbs.org/pov/ showed the documentary online for free on Monday and Tuesday this week. If you didn’t see it, I say go to your local library and check out the DVD. http://www.pbs.org/pov/mostdangerousman/

Ellsberg was not a hippie peacenik. He was an Establishment figure. A Harvard graduate, summa cum laude, Ellsberg then attended Cambridge University on a fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, he spent three years as a U.S. Marine Corps commander. In 1959 he joined the RAND corporation global policy think tank. During the 1960s, he was a Dept. of Defense analyst perpetuating the Cold War line until – in good conscience – he could do it no longer. http://www.ellsberg.net/

He leaked a bombshell government study to newspapers chronicling the history of our Southeast Asian police action. The report – which Ellsberg helped write -- revealed how presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had lied to the public and dragged the United States into an unjust, unwinnable war. Nixon, happy to see his predecessors with their pants down, nevertheless realized a whistleblower could also get dirt on him. So he went after Ellsberg and tried to muzzle the press.

The film’s title is taken from Henry Kissinger. Imagine that, a war criminal calling someone of principle “the most dangerous man in America.” That speaks loudly about the arrogance and hypocrisy of power. Hearing White House tapes of Nixon’s voice is chilling: “You’re so goddamn conscientious about civilians and I don’t give a damn.”

Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers are relevant in 2011. The U.S. military is fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, suicides are on the rise among veterans, wikileaks has revealed things the U.S. government doesn’t want you to know and the guys who blew the whistle are in jail on questionable charges. We would be remiss not to examine history in the context of today’s world and The Most Dangerous Man in America is a great resource for doing that.

The Academy award nominated film is modest, not a hagiography, but I came away from it, seeing Ellsberg as an American hero. It’s a view he would not share. Ellsberg, now 80, feels guilty about the six years he spent in the defense dept., knowing the government was lying to the public, and doing nothing as the death toll mounted in Vietnam.

The “most shameful episode in my life,” he says in the film, was helping Defense Secretary Robert McNamara persuade Pres. Lyndon Johnson to launch the “most disproportionate bombing campaign in the history of the world” on North Vietnam.

Ellsberg’s disaffection with the war evolved gradually, but by the end of the ‘60s, he could no longer remain “a passive bureaucrat.” The most riveting moments of the film reveal Ellsberg anguishing as he confronted a moral dilemma: violate the secrecy contracts he had signed or stay silent as more lives were lost. The man was willing to go to prison for the rest of his life if it meant stopping the war. Hearing this, there was no way I could not respect the man.

Ultimately, a federal judge threw out the government’s case against Ellsberg. (The Nixon administration had compromised the integrity of its investigation with dirty tricks.) But nobody could have foreseen the outcome.

The recent de-classification of the Pentagon Papers was a quiet news item. There were no world shaking revelations. The contents of the documents were revealed by the news media years ago. Really, the public response has been too quiet. We should be asking ourselves: what parallels do we see today? (Wikileaks for one.) Is the government, acting in our name, conducting itself honorably? What are the possible ramifications of our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Is there transparency in government?
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/06/02/libya/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/16/prosecutions http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/25/whistleblowers

I don’t think we’ve learned from our history. Nixonian policy has become a template for the presidency and Vietnam is our template for waging war. History has vindicated Ellsberg, but if we were today fighting a war with American casualties on a scale with Vietnam, and someone leaked documents revealing executive branch weapons of mass deception, I think he would be Typhoid Mary. Most Americans would swallow that hackneyed government stand-by about that person being a traitor, costing American lives and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The same old song and dance.

Gateway films: One Bright Shining Moment. An intriguing documentary about George McGovern’s 1972 presidential run, this film is a reminder of a good opportunity lost.

Gateway books: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s memoir, upon which much of the film is based.

The Arrogance of Power by Sen. J. William Fulbright. This book by the late Arkansas senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a must-read. Fulbright was writing about U.S. mistakes related to Vietnam, but he could just as well have been writing about today. If only America had heeded his advice.

There is a clip of Fulbright in The Most Dangerous Man in America explaining on a TV news show why he voted with the rest of Congress to give LBJ a blank check to wage war in Vietnam. A formidable political mind, Fulbright wasn’t perfect.

A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Man’s Fight to Stop It by Sen. Mike Gravel. The two-term Alaska senator is featured in The Most Dangerous Man for introducing the Pentagon Papers into the public record during a filibuster.

Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House by Egil “Bud” Krogh. The head of Nixon’s plumber’s unit, Krogh served a brief prison term, turned his life around and is the only one of the plumbers to take ownership of his actions. He is interviewed in the Ellsberg documentary.

"How the Great Religions Began" review

2013-12-26T09:05:00.001-08:00

I like the coexist bumper stickers. I'm interested in different faiths. Hence, when I saw Joeseph Gaer's How the Great Religions Began in a thrift store, I bought it.

I was hoping the book would talk about the circumstances in parts of the world that would lead to certain religions originating in those specific regions - the land, conditions, political situations. This book wasn't that deep. However it did refer to how the caste system under Hinduism led to Buddhism and how the the oppression of Jews under the Roman Empire raised hopes for a messiah and gave birth to Christianity.

Gaer's book is basic, a little naive and innocent, respectful and for the time it was written in, quite forward. How the Great Religions Began was written in the 1920s - a time when Christianity was almost the only religion in the United States and Judaism was was a U.S. sub-culture, primarily practiced among Eastern European immigrants on the East Coast.

Religious bigotry in this country was directed at Jews and Catholics. Islam, while it may have existed here since before the Mayflower, by way of the slave trade, was still too minuscule to attract notice. Islamophobia wasn't invented yet in the United States. Of course it's here now in a big way, which makes Gaer's book - while of average scholarly significance - amazingly forward in terms of subject matter and acceptance.

In today's flat, small earth, we have the world and all its cultures accessible at our fingertips. Ninety years ago, it was rare that we would acknowledge an Eastern world existed in history, rarer still for it to be regarded with respect, equal to that of Western culture. Gaer did this, giving space and consideration to such far Eastern religions as Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism and Shintoism.

This isn't to say the book isn't dated. Some of the language, while not disrespectful, may sound that way today. The opening of the chapter on Judaism, while making a point about the diversity within the culture, sounds laughably stereotypical and un-PC today.

There are a few Jews in Abyssinia as dark as any man in that land.
There are a few Jews in China, who like the Chinese, are yellow-skinned and their eyes are almond-shaped and slanted.
There are Jews in Italy, swarthy and black-eyed.
There are Jews in Northern Russia, Canada, Sweden and Norway with blonde hair, white skins and greenish grey eyes.
And there are Jews in Denmark, Germany and Ireland who are red-haired and blue-eyed.
There are short, dark-haired Jews in warmer climates.
There are tall, light-skinned Jews in colder countries.
There are the slender daughters of Zion in Palestine, and there are the fat Jewesses in Tunis and Morocco.

The passage is painful to read, but while it's unpalatable to modern ears, it is a reflection of the naivete' of the times. It is unlikely that Gaer was intentionally being disrespectful to any culture, and he definitely was not expressing anti-semitism. Gaer may have been marveling at the reach of his own culture.

Originally, Joseph Fisherman, he was born Jewish in Yedinitz, Russia in 1897. A lecturer in contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, he held several positions in the federal government over the years, and in 1958, he became founder and director of the Jewish Heritage Foundation in Beverly Hills. He also wrote a book called Our Jewish Heritage.

The strength of the book is Gaer's openness to world religions at a time when the Western world was not that culturally open. He can be forgiven for language that wouldn't go down well today.

Weaknesses in the book include Gaer's writing style, which sometimes sounds condescending. Not toward different cultures, but to the reader. He writes as if he's talking to a child.

Also, the book contains no bibliography or end notes, taking away from any historical value it might otherwise have. Historically, the book is accurate, but basic and without a lot of depth. A better introduction to comparative religion would be Huston Smith's 1958 book, The Religions of Man.

When reading Gaer's book, however, one can take delight in the similarities between the diverse religions: Buddha's Sermon at Benares and Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. Buddha's Four Noble Truths, Eight-fold Path, Confucios's Five Constant Virtues and Christ's Beatitudes. It was interesting to read about how Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism.

Despite Gaer's flaws, there is something fundamentally decent in his naivete' that one finds near the end of the book. In his belief that monotheism is the apex of religious thought, he writes:

The believer in One God (or Monotheist as he is called) realizes that all of mankind must be regarded as one large family, different as may be the color of people's skins, the words of their speech, or the manner of their daily lives...
The true Monotheist realizes that whatever one race does affects all other races; whatever one nation does affects all other nations; whatever one person does affects all other people - for good or for evil.
And from this the true Monotheist is forced to conclude that only what is good for mankind at large is good for the individual. And what is bad for mankind is bad for the individual in the long run.
This is what is meant by the Brotherhood of Man that all the great religions of today preach.
And through this Brotherhood of Man can be attained not through hatred, but love; not through strife, but cooperation; not through war but peace.

Oh, if it were so.

"Great Songs of Christmas (Album Five)" review

2013-12-22T15:00:00.001-08:00

You may have heard this yuletide oldie before in another life. Piping from a hi fi console at your grandparents' house back in the days when Christmas was Christmas. Maybe your grandpa got the album with a purchase of Good Year snow tires for his Buick.

For years, Good Year and Firestone had an annual rivalry. They both released Christmas albums during the holiday season, and each year's offering was a star-studded event. The tire companies and the record companies - Firestone (RCA), Good Year (Columbia) - brought out the big guns recorded Christmas carols - Bing Crosby, Mahalia Jackson, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Robert Goulet, Isaac Stern, Barbara Streisand...

Somewhere around the early '70s, there were no more records. No more albums at your mechanic and tire dealerships the way Starbucks carries CD's today. A more cynical age was taking shape. Christmas carols. TV variety shows full of singing, dancing and cornball humor - that was okay for Don Draper and Roger Sterling's cocktail lounge lives, but the roach smokin', rock generation was graduating from college, joining the workforce and starting families. They didn't care that Maurice Chevalier made a heartwarming comedy movie in 1932.

Perhaps Good Year's Great Songs of Christmas, that album I picked up from the bargain bin at the used record store is carrying the ghost of that man who picked it up with a lube job. Maybe he wore a fedora hat and kept his Pal Malls in a silver-plated cigarette case, who knows? What if that 33 rpm record is the portal? If within its groves, I would slip into the black hole that is the ghost of Christmas Past? .

Album Five, the words on the record sleeve say. That means it was released in 1965. The album sleeve is a Christmas red with images of cute little Christmas cookie angels. Below are pictures of the singers and musicians featured in the album.

O' Holy Night sung by Andy Williams is easily the best recording on the album, not only because it is the greatest Christmas song ever written, but for the way its carried by Williams's velvet-like voice. His stirring vocals give this classic carol the drama and reverence it deserves. I can envision the manger, the illustrious star, grasp the holiness of the scene. Near the end of the song, Williams's voice registers to a falsetto, accentuating its holiness.

With a top-rated TV variety show and hit records coming from all sides, Williams was a smart choice for this album. He may not have been as Christmasy as Perry Como, but he was huge deal in entertainment-at-large.

Williams's recording fittingly begins the album. First cut on side one. The second best track, appropriately enough, is the last one on side two - "Jingle Bells", sung by the swingest cat, Mr. Showbiz, Sammy Davis, Jr. and here, Mr. Davis shows why he is a consummate professional. He takes the most ordinary, cliched of Christmas songs and turns it into a hip, swingin' affair.

But Davis's "Jingle Bells" is only a medley. It leads into the only original composition on the album, "It's Christmas Time All Over the World," written by Hugh Martin, who also wrote such classics as "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." In Davis's hands, this new (for 1965) song takes on a Sinatra-like "Come Fly With Me" vibe. The children's chorus calls to mind Sinatra's "High Hopes," while giving a glimpse of what's to come seven years later when Davis will record that perennial childlike favorite, "The Candy Man."

Naturally, I would prefer that this whole album be in a ballad and swingin' mold, something along the lines of that tradition Michael Buble is keeping alive today. This is not that album. I have, however, come to appreciate what it is - and this is the point at which the time portal works its educational magic. The Great Songs of Christmas (Album Five) is a product of those days when Broadway show tunes, opera and classical orchestras constituted hit album sales.

Take Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Can we ever have enough Eugene Ormandy Orchestra? Don't be so cavalier. I'd say he's worthy of respect. The man conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for 44 years and he had directed the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra for five years before that.

I particularly like the orchestra's performance of "We Three Kings of Orient Are" because it's so historical. Most of us know little about The Wise Men except that they're these figures in Nativity sets who brought the Christ child gold, frankincense and myrrh. According to the book of Matthew, the only Gospel account that mentions them, they did not meet Jesus until he was around two years old and in his home. The orient the song refers to is Persia and the wise men were mostly likely priests of the high caste of Zoroastrianism who were deep into astrology. Therefore, they followed the "star," possibly a comet. Biblical scholars have written that the wise men made the journey because they were aware of the prophecies in Daniel that foretold the birth of the messiah.

Back to Eugene Ormandy. Like Sammy Davis, Jr., he was Jewish, which is interesting since they're featured on a Christmas album. Although Ormandy was born into it and of Hungarian origin.

I recently listened to a segment on NPR, asking "What happened to classical Christmas music?" This album takes the listener back to the days when classical music was still a mainstay of the season's musical palate. Opera singers Andre Kostelanetz, Richard Tucker and Anna Mari Alberghetti are featured, performing The Great Songs of Christmas.

Anna Mari Alberghetti? you ask. She was only on "The Ed Sullivan Show" more than 50 times. A lot more times than Elvis. Her soprano voice in "Caroling, Caroling" captures the sing-along, skippity-skip lilt of the song. With her girlish voice and seasonal aura, one can envision caroling merry makers in a snow-capped gingerbread neighborhood.

Dinah Shore and Doris Day have similar voices - white, sweet and virginal. They are good voices, yet the types that today would not make it past the initial auditioning on "American Idol" or "The Voice" because they would not sound contemporary enough. All the more reason to give them a listen - and a chance. Figure out what made them such smashing stars in the '50s and '60s.

The best selection on this album by a female singer is Diahann Caroll's version of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," not only because her voice is the most original of the female voices on the album, but because the song - although it is more than 400 years old - the least known. Hence, it is the most original. The lyrics about a blooming flower are symbolic of Christ's birth.

Mrs. Webb, the music teacher at my kids's school, is good about bringing fresh songs into the elementary school Christmas concerts she directs. The kids have sang songs about diversity and caring for the earth. Neat, original stuff. "There are about five standard Christmas songs and I didn't want to be 'that teacher,'" she told me.

Overall, The Great Songs of Christmas is that album. Perhaps, it's appropriate, consistent with the album's title. True, "The Little Drummer Boy" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas" aren't my favorite songs. But their inclusion on this album is a window into a time when Christmas conventions were par for the course. The Golden Age of Christmas music lasted from around 1940 to 1965. This album, this culture, which for a time was coexisting with the Beatles was on the wane. In an era when the Beatles are taking their rightful place in history's archives, it is interesting to see the world as it was before.

One of my favorite songs on the album - remember I prefer the jumping tunes - is "Sleigh Ride," sung by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. Here's one that takes me back to the grandparent's house and the hi-fi console. From somewhere in the house, someone was jangling bells and it was proof positive to me that Santa was flying nearby on his sleigh. This yuletide classic pop song, sung by the swift, crisp as clean, swingin' voices of Steve and Eydie captures all that razmatazz.

"Giddyup, giddyup, giddyup, let's go." Steve Lawrence's voice coming in like a lashing whip. Listening, I can only think, "How cool is this guy?"

The somber religious selections by Kostelanetz and Ormandy do seem pedestrian and staid, but when I focus more closely, I think about why they were included here, why this holiday is what it is. It becomes clear in my mind as I hear opera tenor Richard Tucker's version of "The Lord's Prayer." Somber. Reverential. Along with the toy soldier Christmas merriment I felt as a kid at Christmas, I also recapture another holiday feeling I absorbed then - the religiosity.

The belief.

I'm just as jaded and cynical as anyone else. More so, probably. But I'll open the door, the window to that place as art dictates. You may not like every song on this album or every musical style represented, but I say open yourself up and see if you don't find Christmas spirit, real as Doscher's candy canes.

Steve and Edyie Gorme' singing "Sleigh Ride."
Edyie died last August at age 84.
Terrible loss.

On the Christmas album, Richard Tucker sings,
"The Lord's Prayer." Here is Frank Sinatra's
beautiful version of the song.

How could this sweet thing ever be forgotten? Here is Anna Maria's beautiful number, "Love Makes the World Go Round" from the musical "Carnival."

I didn't care for Maurice Chevalier's singing of

"Jolly Old St. Nicholas" and I cared even

less for his version of "Silent Night." But, I love his song, "Mimi"

from the 1932 movie "Love Me Tonight." You really ought to

care about that.

"The Chaperone" review

2013-12-11T20:17:00.000-08:00

Louise Brooks was an icon of the silent film era. But only a few years before she became a celluloid heroine, she was a 15-year-old girl from Wichita, Kan. trying to make it as a dancer in New York. A 36-year-old housewife accompanied her on this trip, acting as her chaperone.

In her novel, The Chaperone, Lori Moriarty imagines the generational tension that likely existed between the teenage Louise and her middle aged chaperone. The two women came of age in entirely different eras and saw the world differently. It is easy to speculate, as Moriarty does, that there was friction.

Cora, the chaperone, is a product of the Victorian era. She's bundled in, wearing a corset and skirts that descend to her feet. In her world, sex is never mentioned and only hinted at in hushed, vague terms if it is even referred to at all.

Louise is already wearing her hair in the straight black classic bob style she will make famous a few years later. She wears skirts raised above the knees and at times goes without a bra. She is coming to bloom in the frivolous Jazz Age with its bathtub gin and relaxed morals.

Although Louise went on to be a film star, she's a supporting character in the novel. This story belongs to Cora. As the chaperone, she tries to keep Louise within the limits of propriety. But it’s Cora who breaks with convention and gains liberated new sensibilities. Cora finds her own unique voice and works through her vulnerabilities to emerge as a strong, independent-minded woman.

Moriarty cleverly uses the corset as a symbol in Cora’s evolving character. She treats the constricting undergarment as a metaphor for the restrictions society placed on women's lives. The moment Cora frees her body from the corset's grip, she frees her mind as well.

But don't discard The Chaperone as a "chick book." I would classify it as historical fiction with an element of mystery. There is enough going on in this book to make it enjoyable to readers of either gender.

Moriarty uses characters and situations to touch on historical events: the Victorian era, Suffragettes, World War I, the Spanish Influenza, the Orphan trains, Klu Klux Klan, the Jazz Age, prohibition, Civil Rights...

She did scrupulous research, which enabled her to get her facts straight and make her story believable. The historical precision gives her writing authenticity and authority. Moriarty’s research shows in the way she weaves in facts about Louise's personal and professional life. Her parents were neglectful. She was molested as a child in Cherryvale, Kan. She did dance with Denishawn in New York, under Ruth St. Dennis. She did have a drinking problem. She did return to Wichita for awhile after her movie career flamed out.

Moriarty is true to Louise's character, having her say and do things like the actual Louise would have done. She is depicted as selfish, self-absorbed and manipulative, just as the real Louise was. Yet it's still easy to like her. Moriarty draws on Louise's life in ways that evoke admiration, as well as sympathy. Her acerbic lines are some of the best in the book.

The relationship between Louise and Cora is the most interesting in a book that contains several interesting and unique relationships. Their dialogue is enlivened by tension and competing interests, creating the most crisp character interplay of the book. Significantly, Cora does find commonalities with Louise, and the two women do develop a cautious respect for each other.

Change is a constant of life, and the two women’s lives are altered forever during that summer when their paths intersect. Their transformations take shape at a time when the rules of society were changing and never going back. But don’t be surprised, when reading this book, if the puritanism, prejudices and “slut shaming” in its pages don’t sound strangely contemporary.

After all, we know what happens the more things change.

Gateway literature

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, which Cora is reading on the trip. Also read the German philosopher Schopenhauer, whom Louise was reading on the same trip. Moriarty did extensive research to make her book historically authentic, and anything from her bibliography would be worth reading. If I had to recommend one, though, it would be Louise Brooks: A Biography by Barry Paris. It's been called the "bible on Brooks."

Gateway films

Anything with Louise Brooks in her prime, of course, especially her greatest artistic achievements, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Here is a video montage of Brooks.

"Stonewall Uprising" review

2013-11-15T19:00:00.001-08:00

The first I ever heard about the Stonewall riots was in college when a fellow student, a gay man, mentioned it in a letter to the editor of our campus newspaper. Never heard of it before.

Today, twenty years later, college history professors and the media are giving Stonewall much closer attention. Pres. Obama mentioned it in his second inaugural address. Current events have brought the struggle for homosexual rights to increased relevance. The 2010 PBS American Experience documentary, Stonewall Uprising, is timely. For anyone wishing to gain understanding of how LGBT rights arrived at its current place in American debate, the film is a must see. http://video.pbs.org/video/1889649613/

In June of 1969, police raided a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York’s Greenwich Village. Gays and lesbians were used to this kind of encroachment, but this time they’d had enough. A riot ensued. Bar patrons, who outnumbered law enforcement, resisted police efforts to shut them down.

Stonewall Uprising features telling interviews with participants in the uprising as well as a retired New York police officer who led the raid.

Around half the documentary is back-story. It shows that antipathy and unsympathetic views toward consenting adults’ sexual practices were much more pervasive 50 years ago, if not as talked about as today. Black and white public service announcements and television news programs of the time depicted homosexuals as perverts, social pariahs. In one chilling scene, a detective charged with maintaining “public morals” speaks harshly in a paranoia inducing diatribe against homosexuals before a large room of sober-faced, scary-eyed teenagers.

“If we catch you with an avowed homosexual, your parents will be the first to know,” the man says.

The historical background is the most interesting aspect of the documentary. It gives context, showing how Stonewall was inevitable – the reaction of people who were tired of being pushed around.

Watching this documentary, it becomes clear why so many LGBT people today are vocal in fighting for its rights. Traditionally, they had no rights. A McCarthy-like atmosphere hung over the lives of gays. An individual could lose a job, get arrested and be outed in the newspaper. A person’s life could be ruined over his or her sexual orientation.

Hatemongering against homosexuals exists today among a vocal and virulent religious right. However, majority public opinion has evolved today into a view favorable toward equal rights for LGBT people (e.g.) gay marriage and freedom from discrimination. But with each decade we look back to, we find more intolerance until we’re back in the 1960s. Today we associate vituperation and homophobia with the lunatic fringe. Back then, hatred was standard.

I have heard that friendships among LGBT people tend to be tighter than those in the heterosexual population. After seeing this documentary, I see why. Along with police harassment, violent assault was commonplace. People wound up in wheelchairs; they were beaten so savagely. LGBT people come from a culture and history in which it’s imperative that they watch each other’s backs.

But life was never the same after Stonewall. There were no more comparable police crackdowns. Gays and lesbians, who had been pushed into the underground, came out and embraced their own identities.

“There was no going back,” one of the Stonewall participants said. In the most poignant moment from the film, a small gay pride parade turns into a march of roughly 2,800 people.

“We became a people,” one man said. “All of a sudden I had brothers and sisters, which I didn’t have before.”

More than 40 years later, homophobia, like racism, is still around. The Religious Right may be a minority, but it’s a loud, pugnacious one that still holds a degree of power. Certain politicians still get a bang out of exploiting hatred and paranoia.

But they’re losing more elections. They are losing their grip on the public consciousness. The time is ripe for LGBT people to enjoy the same legal protection, the same rights as other Americans. Stonewall is just a small window into what they have endured to reach this point.

Best line: “It eats you up inside, not being comfortable with yourself.”

This is a line from Raymond Castro, one of the participants in Stonewall. He died in 2010 after helping with this documentary, as did Seymour Pine, the retired NYPD officer who led the raid on Stonewall. In his final years, Pine was regretful and publicly apologized for his role in the police crackdown.

Gateway films

Out of the Past: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights in America – This is a documentary about Keli Peterson, a Utah teenager who formed a Gay-Straight Alliance at her high school in 1996 and encountered statewide backlash. Through her story, the film goes into the history of gays, lesbians and their battle for equality in America.

Anyone and Everyone – This documentary, made for PBS in 2007, explores the reaction of parents when their children come out. The film looks at families from a multitude of ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The Laramie Project – Originally a stage production, this play was adapted to the screen and aired on HBO in 2002. Shot to resemble a documentary, this film features the reactions of townspeople from across the spectrum about the 1998 beating death of a young gay man, Matthew Shepherd, in Laramie, Wy.

Gateway literature

Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter. This journalistic and historical treatment of the riots may be the definitive account of Stonewall. It covers the same ground as Stonewall Uprising, but at 352 pages, it contains much more detail.

William James (Great American Thinkers) review

2013-10-22T04:55:00.001-07:00

I was introduced to William James in a college class. Learned he is the Father of Pragmatism – a simplified philosophy that I cottoned to. So when I recently found a thin, paperback, paperback book about William James at a book sale in a church basement, I grabbed it up.

Called the first original American philosophy, pragmatism comes down to this: the action that brings about the most practical result is the right one. James called practical consequences the “cash value” of an idea. Since that mode of thinking permeates American society today, I believe James is worthy of consideration.

A slim, succinct book (unlike James’s own books) simply entitled William James, it was written in the 1960s by Edward C. Moore as part of the Great American Thinkers series of books. This series also included short bios about Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thorstein Veblen and others who influenced American thought.

Primarily a summary and evaluation of James’s works, the book also provides brief biographical information about James and the time in which he lived. That is the best feature of this book -- putting James’s philosophy into the context of the 19^th century New England culture he came of age in. Really, I see no way not to read the book when coming upon this sentence on the first page.

“The intellectual history of William James is almost an intellectual biography of America.”

Looking over the beliefs and mythologies that have defined American history, I can see a dichotomy that parallels the opposing poles James struggled with. The Puritans brought to the colonies a Calvinist belief in God’s omnipotence, man’s helplessness and predestination. But those settlers also pioneered the prevailing American spirit of adventure, experimentation and shaping our own destinies.

The two beliefs came to a head at the time James was coming of age. As a man of science, he could not disregard empiricism and Darwinian determinism. As a man of his culture, he could not leave God and morality out of the equation. His genius was in mediating the two extremes, finding a sensible middle ground between John Calvin and Charles Darwin. In that way, you might say he was the last 19^th century man and first 20^th century man.

James’s most interesting – and controversial – idea was his theory of “relative truth.” This idea is easier to accept in the science realm where even the most airtight “scientific fact” (gravity, for instance) is only a theory that can be overturned by evidence. With regard to morals, however, “relative truth” doesn’t go down so well.

I can envision some preacher on Sunday morning, saying, “The world would have you believe morals are relative and can be tossed aside when they aren’t convenient.” That would be a misinterpretation of James’s view. I think of relative truth in the context of a moral dilemma. An action that’s moral under one set of circumstances might be wrong under another.

Most people probably want to believe there are immutable moral truths. I certainly do, but I also recoil at absolutism. It’s not within human power to define with certainty what constitutes meaning in the universe.

Today, the Calvinism that caused such internal conflict for James and his contemporaries is foreign even to the most Presbyterian of us. Pragmatism, we can relate to. It’s not without imperfections and limitations -- no school of philosophy is – but it’s accessible and user-friendly. James rescued philosophy from its aloof and lofty palace in the sky and brought it down to nuts and bolts. A uniquely American approach.

It has been fun reading about William James, learning the definitions of – and chewing on the ideas of – what he termed “meliorism,”” pluriverse” and “pure experience". Now, I plan to free space in my home library by parting with this book. It will be a pragmatic move. (Later) Actually, I sold it for a quarter at a garage sale.

Gateway reading: William James’s writings, of course, particularly his magnum opus, The Varieties of Religious ExperienceT. Then there are great biographies of James, such as William James: In the Malestrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson. A book I've always wanted to read is The Metaphysical Club is about the young James, future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Charles Spencer Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics, and a conversational, philosophical club they had in Cambridge, Mass. in 1872.

I would also recommend reading works by writers who were students of James's at Harvard University: W.E.B. Dubois, Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, George Santanya, Walter Lippman

Then there are others who were influenced by James: Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Michael Foucalt.

I cannot not recommend 19th century essayist, lecturer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the biggest name in the transcendental movement. He was James's godfather

I would suggest reading biographies of and writings by John Calvin and Charles Darwin.

Lastly, I would suggest reading more slim books from the old Great American Thinkers series. You'll find them in garage sales, library and church book sales and eBay. See where they take you in your reading.

"Strength to Love" review

2013-08-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

For Martin Luther King, Jr. the issue of Civil Rights was as Biblical as it was Constitutional. King’s words – in his speeches and writings – make abundantly clear that his social activism was inseparable from his Christian faith. Strength to Love is a collection of sermons by King. In the book’s various essays, most of which begin with a Bible verse, King quotes the poetic words of Old Testament prophets and draws from the parables of Jesus to illustrate his message of social justice.

The Supreme Court decision overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine, King equated with the parting of the waters that cleared a path for the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. The South’s obstinate refusal to release its Jim Crow hold over African Americans, King equated with the pharaoh’s unwillingness to grant the Jews their freedom. Coming to the aid of anyone whose beaten down and oppressed no matter who they are or what religion, nationality or color they might be – King likened to the Good Samaritan who aided the Jewish man, left robbed and beaten by the roadside.

Strength to Love was published in 1963 – the same year King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Washington Mall. Fifty years later King and his message of racial equality have been validated by history. Conservatives even laude him, but if King were still alive, people on the right would be calling him un-American, a socialist and communist, just as they were 50 years ago.

The views he expressed from the stage and church pulpit were controversial in the 1960s and still are today. In this series of sermons, as well as other writings and speeches, King speaks out against war, imperialism and capitalist exploitation of labor. Today -- in an age when Christianity appears locked and limited to rigid conservatism, a political party, exclusion,” American exceptionalism” and a belief that the “invisible hand” of capitalism is from God -- it’s refreshing to visit King’s progressive, liberating and expansive interpretation of Christian love.

King did not yield his Christian belief to the chauvinistic view that America is blessed above all other nations. He would never have joined the clergymen who urged Pres. George W. Bush -- by letter -- to go to war with Iraq. A full year before the Gulf of Tonkin incident even sparked the Vietnam War, King was advocating for peace. He was critical of the military industrial complex and nuclear proliferation. In the Cold War era, as in today, anyone not beating the drum for war is branded “treasonous,” and said to be “aiding and abetting the enemy.” King faced that kind of backlash, but he called for cooled, reasoned minds -- something we’re still desperately in need of today. The following quote sounds sadly appropriate in our time.

“Let us not join those who shout war and who through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days when Christians must evince wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or appeaser who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers...”

King was a citizen of the world. Drawing on Christ’s words – Love thy neighbor as thyself – he considered anyone in the global community who was suffering to be a neighbor in need of help. The plight of people living under colonial domination in Asia and Africa, in his mind, mirrored the oppression African Americans suffered under slavery and segregation.

"Were he alive today, King wouldn’t be fighting the “Culture Wars.” For the past thirty-some years, the Religious Right has been finding evil in the entertainment industry. King saw evil in the exploitation of others, in depriving people of their human dignity. Christian conservatives home in on legalistic Biblical passages – ambiguous and open to interpretation – and stick them to peoples’ sex lives. King’s focus was on the spirit – the redemptive power of love and compassion spoken of in the scriptures.

What passes for mainstream Christianity today is small-minded and pitifully anti-intellectual. King demonstrates through these sermons, a thinking person’s Christianity. That’s evident from the first page of the book when he links a Bible verse to Hegelian philosophy.

Throughout these writings, King shows himself to be highly educated (he had a doctorate) and diverse in his reading. He shows the influence of everyone from 19^th century evangelical abolitionist William Wilberforce to Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. In one of his sermons, he uses the word, “soulforce,” a term lifted from Gandhi. In another, he refers to “I-and-thou” relationships, a concept originated by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. He spoke of the Muslim-Hindu fighting that shattered Gandhi’s dream of peace in India. Clearly, King’s sense of integration stretched far beyond skin color and it’s a sure bet that he wouldn’t be jumping on the Islamaphobia plaguing America today.

One of the chapters in Strength to Love is entitled “Shattered Dreams.” He had a lot of dreams that didn’t come true – dreams that went far and above the passage of Civil Rights legislation. It’s left to the living to advance King’s work and bring those dreams to reality. King was a flawed individual. He wasn’t a saint and should not be seen as such, but his tireless activism and vision were bigger than he was.

For anyone wanting to understand King beyond the basic historical facts, Strength to Love would be a superb introduction. The book reveals the thoughts and influences that motivated King to persevere through endless marches and protests without surrender.

Anyone desiring to have their spiritual, intellectual or social consciences invigorated would benefit from reading Strength to Love. It’s not important that one shares King’s religion or even agrees with him on everything to get something from the book. His humanitarian principles were universal.

"When Religion Becomes Evil" review

2013-05-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

Writer's note: The Boston Marathon bombing has brought the topic of religious extremism into the news again. Charles Kimball, the author of this book, has been interviewed on radio and TV frequently in the past few weeks. In that contemporary spirit, I am publishing my review of, probably, his most famous book. I indentify his as the chair of the the University of Oklahoma's Religious Studies program. When this book was published 10 years ago, Kimball chaired the Dept. of religion and divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/K/Charles.A.Kimball-1/bio.html

I’ve often been baffled by religion. It does a lot of good in the world, but it also does a lot of harm.

Obviously, religion is neither black nor white. But how do we sort through the gray matter to identify where religion crosses the line from righteous to evil? That’s the question religion professor Charles Kimball takes on in his book, When Religion Becomes Evil.

Kimball, who chairs the religious studies program at the University of Oklahoma, makes an interesting distinction between what he calls “authentic religion” and religion that has been “corrupted.” He writes that the world’s enduring, time-tested religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism…were all founded on fundamental principles of love, peace, kindness and harmony.

However, that authenticity is eroded and the essence of those faiths is lost when human corruption takes root within the religions. Kimball is balanced, sparing none of the above mentioned religious organizations as he cites examples – from history and modern headlines -- of how every one of them has been guilty of committing barbaric and ghastly acts of violence.

A Christian minister, Kimball was educated in comparative religions and has worked internationally with interfaith organizations. He draws on his extensive education and experience and identifies five warning signs that religion is about to turn evil: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishing the “ideal” time, the end justifies any means and declaring holy war.

One or more of these patterns are always present when a religion takes a turn for the bad and all religions are susceptible to corruption, Kimball writes. In essence, all five warning signs come down to this: a disregard for humanity in the name of God. Anytime a religious organization uses doctrine or the religious institution itself to justify hurting others, that religion has become evil. When a religion employs violent or anti-social means, when it fails to follow the Golden Rule, the religion has been contaminated. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/28/when-religious-beliefs-becomes-evil-4-signs/comment-page-24/

Religions are “human institutions,” Kimball writes. That’s an important reminder. It explains why a beautiful religion can take a wrong turn. Throughout history, people have been led astray by charismatic political leaders so it stands to reason that they can be misled by charismatic religious leaders as well.

A religious leader could take a passage from a “sacred text” out of context and use it to justify cruel or violent behavior. These passages are open to many interpretations and any leader who claims to have the “absolute truth” is opening the door to abuse.

When Religion Turns Evil talks about cult leaders like Jim Jones, Ashara Shoko and David Koresh, but what I find interesting is that a religious leader doesn’t have to be that extreme, doesn’t even have to be violent to cross the line into evil. Any time a religious leader demands “blind allegiance” to his authority or to the institution and prohibits questions or dissent, the religion is tainted.

The best message to come out of this book is to have an open mind and keep your critical thinking powers activated. It’s the best defense against manipulation by an abusive religious leader. Kimball makes a case for the individual asking his own questions, defining what he believes and finding his own path, rather than having a religious authority tell him what to think. That sounds intellectually healthy.

I enjoyed his comparative religions approach. It served him well in writing this book and opened my mind to other belief systems. Of course, Kimball was practically born into comparative religions. His Jewish grandfather and nine siblings immigrated to the United States from Russia. His father married a Presbyterian woman he met, while performing in Vaudeville and Kimball became an ordained Baptist minister.

For me it’s fascinating, finding the commonalities between my Christian faith and Islam or Buddhism. But not everyone will be receptive to the idea of placing the different religions on an equal playing field. I know Christians who consider Islam in any form to be the great Satan, and no doubt, the reverse is true. And that kind of thinking exacerbates the problems. Religious exceptionalism tends to dehumanize those with a different view.

This book re-enforced for me that the spiritual dimension of a person’s life is about more than just doctrines. Theological views may differ, but people across the cultural and religious spectrum can agree on basic morals. Religious views, we take on faith, anyway. We really don’t know anything for a certainty in this life.

I found interesting, this quote Kimball shared from the Qur’n: “If God had so willed, He would have made all of you one community… so compete with one another in good works. To God, you shall all return and He will tell you the truth about that which you have been disputing.”

Watched an interview with this guy on CNN, yesterday, while on the treadmill at the YMCA. Was looking to publish that recent clip, but couldn't find it as of deadline.

Gateway Literature

Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill by Jessica Stern. A former member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Stern is an expert on worldwide terrorism, having visited refugee camps and interviewed Christian, Muslim and Jewish extremists from Pakistan, Indonesia and all over. That's what I call being a hard-core, investigative reporter.

Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths by Harvey Cox. For decades, a professor of divinity at Harvard University, Cox, traveled throughout the world and gained insight, hearing how people of multiple faiths perceive Christ. Cox is a prolific author and this book should help inquiring minds grow beyond the White-Male-Christian-American Exceptionalism box.

Also, I say read all you can about Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucious, Moses...We won't agree with everything from the various faiths, but in a small, multi-faceted world, we'll make it a lot better with one another, knowing a little something about the many beliefs.

'Mean Old Man' review

2013-05-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

It’s been said that if Elvis was rock’s first superstar, Jerry Lee Lewis was its first SOB.

Born out of hellfire, Pentecostal fury, and Original Sin in a patch of Louisiana, the Killer sprang forth upon this earth for the cause of meanness and hell raisin.’

Like Keith Richards, Lewis should have never lived this long. In an alternate universe, Elvis would’ve lived to be an old man (oh, he would lose a toe or two to diabetes, but he’d be around), while Cash and Lewis would have died young, fallen to a drug overdose or the killing end of a bullet. As it is, here in the real world, Elvis could have never grown old gracefully, but Jerry Lee flaunts his longevity with bred-in-the bone bravado.

“If I come on like a mean old man, that’s what I am,” he sings – the first words uttered in the 2010 album’s opening title track, a song written and recorded by Kris Kristofferson sometime back in the ‘80s. Kristofferson contributes vocals and guitar playing, but Lewis steals the song. Lyrics pour out the Killer’s throat as if they were written with him in mind.

“If I come on like a voodoo doll that’s what I am,” he sings as the tempo picks up. “I’d rather scratch you than to have to crawl.

The rock royalty chomping at the bit to jam with Presley and the TCB Band in the early 70s, yet held at bay by the Colonel’s iron curtain, got another chance with Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. With Mean Old Man, Lewis (as he did with his 2006 Last Man Standing album) again gives the biggest names in rock the opportunity to record with him. Mean Old Man features the musicianship and vocalizing of cats like Richards, Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Kid Rock and a skinny, chickenwalking Swingin’ London veteran, Tina-Turner-emulatin’ crap shooter ___

Mick Jagger. The greatest cut by a mile is Lewis’s duet with Jagger on the Rolling Stones’ classic Dead Flowers -- enriched by the steel guitar of Greg Leisz -- and it’s appropriate, given that the entire album has something of an early 70s’ Stones-Gram Parsons-Sticky Fingers-Exile on Main Street feel.

The resurgent Last Man Standing was a digital restoration of vintage Lewis -- plenty of pumping piano, the killer summoning young man rhythm and all the boogie-woogie and Little Richard-era style and frenzy implied. Mean Old Man goes another way, drawing back to middle-aged Jerry Lee Lewis and true country-rock.

Lewis and his band of all-stars take an obscure early ‘60s soul-pop hit, “You Can Have Her”, and turn it into southern fried rock, bolstered by the guitar work of Eric Clapton and James Burton, bringing to the tune a lifetime of rhythm and rockabilly flourish. John Mayer’s blues guitar work in “Roll Over Beethoven” is flat out mean. Jerry Lee, with his piano playing and old man voice, surpasses his own 1970 recording of the song, giving this standard, overplayed Chuck Berry tune renewed vigor.

The Beatles have been as overplayed as Elvis, but I'm posting this video because Lewis covers "Roll Over Beethoven" with Ringo contributing drums. In this video, the Beatles cannot always be heard over the screams, but the energy is there in the body language. Here, Starr plays with a ferocity that doesn't come across as lively on his recording with Lewis.

While the country-fashioned superband is stellar, too many times Lewis’s trademark piano is submerged under the weight of it all. Not that he’s ever upstaged. Make no mistake on that one. Clapton, three Rolling Stones and a Beatle perform on this album, and they’re all in deference to Jerry Lee Lewis. Musically, though, there are times when I want more of him and less of them.

There’s always the risk that on an all-star collaboration like this, the party atmosphere will take over and the album will become more of an Event and less a professional objective. Mean Old Man comes close to that line at times, but is ultimately saved by hard musician work and ear-pleasing gems.

Kid Rock is one of the stars whom you might most worry about when facing the danger of pop-rock celebrity overkill, but he actually contributes to some of the best driving rock of the album – and I’m talking about Jerry Lee Lewis. He pounds over the 88 keys in whole lotta shakin’ style and his low voice complements Kid Rock’s screechy ventilator vocals in the Lewis classic, Rockin' My Life Away. Since Kid Rock -- more than any other contemporary rockstar – channels within his soul, the wild ass side of young Jerry Lee Lewis, maybe it’s only organic, the way his excesses actually serve the old man. Even with his two-tables-and-a-microphone Kid Rockisms, the young rock-rapper-country star never comes off as less than humble and with abiding respect in the presence of Jerry Lee Lewis.

And you got Slash on guitar. Doesn't get much better.

Most of the guest vocals on this album can’t be heard over Jerry Lee and the other musicians – Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow, with their high raspy voices being the most prominent exceptions. While Kid Rock wails with rock n’ roll fervor, Sheryl Crow brings in a shot of estrogen and controlled sweetness. You hear in her singing of “You Are My Sunshine” with Lewis. For vocal distinction, harmonizing & a superior song to work with, however, Jagger and Jerry Lee can’t be beat.

Which brings us to a saucy Stones gem “Sweet Virginia,” sung with Keith Richards -- an ingenious guitarist who can’t sing. But Lewis and Richards have an affinity with the tune and each other that comes through with unique style. After all, it’s a song about dissolution, druggin’, depression and all the happiness of the vineyards from California to Ol’ Tom Jefferson’s Monticello.

The only real disappointment on this album is the final track, a remake of Lewis’s 1970s’ country hit, “Middle Age Crazy.” The original version had sincerity, an honesty that conveyed what Lewis was going through in his life at the time. Today it’s just another song, and Tim McGraw’s voice on the revised track sounds like that of a million other country singers. Yes, the authenticity is gone as Lewis crossed the mid-life crisis bridge some time back.

But take him for all he’s still giving. “The real deal right here.” Kid Rock can be heard saying that after Lewis just kills it at the end of Rockn’ My Life Away. Like Willie Nelson, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards and the recently departed George Jones, this old guy is a survivor.

Jerry Lee Lewis and he’s damn sure here to stay.

Gateway Music

Everything from the Golden Age of the Rolling Stones (1968-1972) from Beggar's Banquet to Exile on Main Street. Mick and the boys rode the British invasion, reviving Buddy Holly and turning white kids on to Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke and the Temptations. In their Golden Age, they would harken to cool dead people from Robert Johnson to the Louvin Brothers.

Everything by Gram Parsons from his late 60s work with the Byrds, International Submarine Band and Flying Burrito Brothers and especially his classic early '70s solo albums, GP and Grevious Angel. Gram turned Keith on to country music and Keith turned Gram on to heroin, so they say.

Nashville -- Solomon Burke. The African-American self-proclaimed king of rock and soul paid tribute to country music -- a love of his since boyhood -- about a year or two before he died. A must hear. Posting a link to an NPR story about Burke and this album upon its release. I remember hearing the news story in my car radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6598905

Beaucoups of Blues -- Ringo Starr. Around the time the Beatles disbanded (circa 1969-70), each of the boys explored their own individual voices and interests on solo records. Here, Starr indulges his love of country music with A-list Nashville musicians. I'm talking guys who'd worked with the likes of Patsy Cline, Chet Atkins, Tammy Wynette, the Statler Brothers -- hardcore Nashville.

Gateway literature

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches. A kick-ass writer whose taken on everything from journalistic treatments of Dean Martin and boxing legend Sonny Liston to gothic novels about vampires and Dante's inferno. I first read excerpts of his biography of Lewis in an "Entertainment for Men" magazine when I was in junior high. What my buddies didn't know when we were oggling the girls in stolen moments by the water tower after school is that I was also -- in private moments -- reading the Playboy interviews, short stories, jazz reviews and book excerpts and though I didn't realize it at the time, I was studying.

My favorite version of the song. Wasn't this portrait taken after Jerry Lee got drunk and waved a gun from inside his white Lincoln Continental near the gates of Graceland?

A forgotten artist whom we would do well to rediscover. He had something. "You Can Have Her" was covered by Lewis, Elvis, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Rich & I don't know who else.

I kept trying to post a Stones video of this song and I'd get this message about it being too big for my player or something like that. Then I googled how to get around that, but the tutorials confused me more. The ADHD set in deeper. This video has only been seen around 557 times. Some of the best ones are. Anyhow, I was getting so frustrated, I almost said "screw it" & posted some bar band doing a half-assed cover of the song. You know something? Let's do that anyway.

This is where it started for The Killer -- Jerry Lee Lewis.

How the Irish Saved Civilization -- Review

2013-03-17T10:45:00.001-07:00

We all know the Irish gave us shamrocks, Notre Dame and St. Patrick’s Day parades. But not too many people would connect the Irish to Homer’s Illiad, Virgil’s Aenid and other such works of classical antiquity.

Medieval historians and people from the Emerald Isle know about the Irish monks who kept classical literature alive after the Roman Empire fell and helped pull Europe out of the Dark Ages. Thomas Cahill gave these monks their due with his 1994 book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. They’re still underrated, but word has gotten around.

Cahill writes with as if he’s talking personally to the reader. He’s like the deft raconteur in an Irish pub, bending your ear over a mug of beer. More a love letter to his Irish heritage than a scholarly work, How the Irish Saved Civilization nevertheless has historical merit.

Common -- and legitimate – criticisms are that the book has a Eurocentric title and doesn’t mention how Islamic scholars paved the way to the Renaissance with their contributions to math, science, literature and the re-discovery of Aristotelian philosophy. But keep in mind, Cahill’s focus is on the re-flowering of Greco-Roman literature, not the sciences. Cahill does mention the preservation work of Byzantine scholars once, but not until nearly the end of the book. In the introduction, he inflates the Irish monks’ role, writing that they “single-handedly refounded European civilization.”

I consider those criticisms to be mild, yet legitimate. Nasty reviews I’ve read, saying the book is full of “lies,” are not. Cahill revels in his Irish roots and at times, he may give way to hyperbole, but overall the book is accurate. I did my own research and confirmed it.

There was, as the book mentions, an Irish monk in the 6th century named Columcille who established a monastery in Scotland called Iona. A monk named Columbanus started famous monestaries like, Luxeil and Bobio. He did travel to present-day France, Switzerland and Italy. Irish saints, such as Brigid of Kildare, Saint Gall of the Alps and Saint Fursey did help restore intellectual life to Europe.

Ireland was renowned for its monestaries; they were the universities of the Medieval period. Irish scholars were instrumental in the Carolingian renaissance of the 8th century, contributing to Charlemagne’s Palatine school. Disciples of Irish monks went on to form their own monasteries and the knowledge proliferated across the continent.

There is a reason Ireland is called the Land of Saints and Scholars. The historical facts bear it out: the Irish helped illuminate the Dark Ages.

I'm posting this video because it's by an Irish

rock band and it's about Detroit. Like Medieval

Europe, Detroit -- original homeland of many

great things -- has been relegated to an

American Dark Ages and is in need of a

Renaissance.

So what made Ireland such an intellectual hub? Location. It was an out of the way island, off the radar screen of the Roman army. Hence, the Barbarians also left it alone. While Germanic Tribes were sacking the Roman Empire and destroying its libraries, learned men retreated to the insular northern isle. When the Irish converted to Christianity, they transcribed the Gospels, followed by the rest of the Bible and went on to the pagan works of the fallen empire.

Cahill does not start talking about these monks until the last quarter of the book, another reason why he might have chosen a different title. At first, it’s unclear why Cahill focuses on the fall of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine and the Latin writer Ausonious. What do they have to do with Irish history? Near the end, it all fits together.

Cahill uses Augustine as a lens from which to view the late Roman Empire, but also as a contrast to St. Patrick. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, was austere, erudite and melancholic. St. Patrick was earthy, unlettered and friendly. Augustine represented the one facet of Roman life that survived when the empire fell – the Catholic Church. St. Patrick represented the unique Irish Catholic Church, “the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history.”

The Celtic cross on the cover of the book is a clue to why St. Patrick was successful in converting the Irish. He met them where they lived and if they wanted to combine their ancient Druidism with their newfound Christianity, it was all good. Such independent thinking enabled the Irish to handle ancient Greco-Roman literature without the hang-ups other European Christians had about pagan works.

Book of Kells

Cahill describes how the Irish related to and influenced the Catholic Church. I did not know until reading this book that confession used to be public. The Irish started the tradition of private confession before a priest. Cahill expressed an interesting view regarding the Irish and The Church:

“It is a shame that private confession is one of the few Irish innovations that passed into the universal church. How different might Catholicism be today if it had taken over the easy Irish attitudes toward diversity, authority, the role of women and the relative unimportance of sexual mores.”

Cahill’s opinions are informed. While his book is more lighthearted than scholarly, Cahill – a retired professor with degrees in subjects like philosophy and classical literature -- is scholarly. The sources he cites in his bibliography are scholarly.

How the Irish Saved Civilization is far from perfect. The definitive work on the Medieval Irish monks is yet to be written. But Cahill’s book is a fun read and a great starting point for history lovers who want to learn more. It whets my appetite to read more about Augustine and St. Patrick.

Oh, and it also wets my appetite to imbibe in some barley beverages with my friends at our favorite neighborhood dive on St. Patrick’s Day.

Gateway Literature: Cahill has gone on to write books on the contributions Jews, Christians and Greeks have made to civilization. They would be good to check out. With these other explorations of cultures, I think it would be neat if Cahill went ahead and wrote about the Islamic scholars – and maybe others from the East – who influenced Western culture. But I don't think that's his forte.

I mentioned that Cahill cites scholarly sources. All the works cited in his bibliography are worth delving into especially the series of books by retired Princeton University professor Peter Brown. His scholarship in late Roman antiquity, Medieval times and the early church was groundbreaking and Cahill could not have written his book, had Brown not paved the way.

Then there’s the classical works: Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Juvenal, Ovid, Tacticus…I say, read ‘em with relish. I definitely plan to read, compare and contrast Augustine’s Confession and St. Patrick’s Confession.

Hell, I can’t let St. Patrick’s Day go by without speaking up for the top echelon of Irish writers: Frank McCourt (“It was of course a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”), Seamus Heaney and going back, James Joyce. (Ulysses, lost in veiled sexuality, anxiety and eternal pedantry will screw pleasingly with your mind.)

My friend, Marilyn Parrish -- a Joycean scholar and retired English professor at Wichita’s Newman University – once got to chat with Seamus Heaney for about three hours at some pub in the hills of Ireland. She died a couple of years ago. Miss you, Marilyn. Classic Book Club at Watermark ain’t the same without you.

Gateway Music: Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly, the Pogues: They effing rock – and they wear their Irishness like the Kinks wore their Englishness. Is it okay to mention the English alongside the Irish? Well screw it, call me sacrilegious, but I did it.

I can’t leave out The Clancy Brothers, a traditional Irish folk quartet that gained fame across the Atlantic when Irish-American Catholic John F. Kennedy was in the White House. I knew nothing about this group until a few years ago when NPR reported that Liam Clancy, of the group, died at age 74. These Irish folkies influenced promethean American folk-rocker Bob Dylan and apparently they were featured multiple times on The Ed Sullivan Show – a lot more times than The Beatles.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation review

2012-12-24T19:31:00.002-08:00

Familiarity breeds contempt. That’s never truer than with family. Mix it with holiday stress and you've got tension bordering on combustible. Yet, even if plans go awry and everything turns to bedlam, Christmas gatherings make for our most joyous memories from childhood. So we honor tradition by joining together in a spirit of yuletide hell.

But hey, misery loves comedy.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is the third – and funniest – installment of Vacation movies to come out in the 1980s. The comedy from filmmaker John Hughes follows the madcap formula set by the previous Vacation films except in this film, the Grisswolds stay home and the annoying relatives vacation at their house. If The Breakfast Club was Hughes’s most angst-filled and teen-centered comedy, Christmas Vacation was his most slapstick and familial.

You gotta’ love Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase). If he risks giving his daughter hypothermia, picking out the “perfect Christmas tree” in the forest, it’s only because he wants to create memories for his family. Sure his good-hearted efforts always blow up like exploding sewage against a deep blue sky on Christmas night. But God love this sentimental fool – this most classic of goofball dads. He’s got a heart as big as the North Pole.

He relishes the 25,000 twinkling lights on his house. True, he causes a temporary power outage in Chicago, but you know, he put a lot of work into it. (Christmas Vacation took place in suburban Chicago, as did all Hughes’s films.)

Haven’t we all known a Griswold Christmas house? A gaudy, blinding, incandescent display of Christmas excess. In my hometown it was the house with psychedelic Christmas lights or the one with an iridescent American flag hovering over the baby Jesus. But maybe those people were showing the enthusiasm of a Clark Griswold.

If you don’t that, maybe you’re like Grizwold’s Grinch-like next door neighbors Todd and Margo Chester, played respectively by Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (prior to her work as Elaine on Seinfeld). They’re a cold, self-loving, Regan era, pretentious and most bah-humbug couple who disdain Griswold and his incorruptible Christmas cheer. (He accidently sends a Christmas tree flying through their window.)

Then there are the relatives – a comic mélange of older actors playing grandparents, aunts and uncles. (Of these veteran actors and actresses, only Doris Roberts is still living.) There’s the senile old aunt who puts her cat in a gift box and says the pledge of allegiance, when asked to say grace at dinner and the uncle who wears a rug on his head and falls asleep with a lit cigar in his mouth.

But the all out craziest character – can anyone who’s seen this movie not agree? – is Cousin Eddie. Randy Quaid truly brought something inside himself to this role. His mansplainin’ body language, trailer-chawed voice and commanding leisure suit scream Cousin Eddie.

We’ve all had a Cousin Eddie in our lives. In Christmas Vacation, he is the relative from the boughs of hell, the hick who shows up unannounced; parking a dilapidated RV that looks like it came from a survivalist camp next to your house. He and his family plan to stay a month. Oh and the family includes a Rottweiler -bloodhound mix named Snots who likes to get in the trash and go to town on your leg.

The interplay between Clark and Cousin Eddie makes for some of the funniest dialogue in a movie. The physical and situational comedy is complemented by great writing from John Hughes.

Examples:

"They had to replace my metal plate with a plastic one. Every time Catherine would rev up the microwave, I’d piss my pants and forget who I was for about half an hour.”

“You couldn’t hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant.”

“Shall I get you some eggnog, something to eat, drive you to the middle of nowhere, and leave you for dead?”

Cousin Eddie’s financial woes coincide with Clark’s own troubles. He’s counting on his Christmas bonus, but finds out at the last minute that his boss, Frank Shirley, played by Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill’s brother) hasn’t given bonuses this year. He’s a nicely comic bad guy, serving as a Scrooge-like character. With Christmas gone to pot, Clark gone a little psychotic (the scene of him punching the plastic Santa in his lawn may be the biggest belly laugh scenes of the movie) and a police car scene reminiscent of The Blues Brothers, the film reaches a comic pinnacle big as the polar express. The comic scenes in the last quarter of Christmas Vacation have been successfully copied in other films.

Released Dec. 1, 1989, Christmas Vacation capped off a decade in which its screenwriter John Hughes was king. A year later, Hughes’s other wonderful Christmas movie – his last truly great movie – Home Alone would be released. There would be a bit more film dabbling, but for all intents and purposes, he was retired. He died in 2009, another vestige of my youth gone.

In an otherwise lackluster decade of yuppie-like plasticity, Hughes wrote with truth, revealing in his teen movies, a feeling of empathy like no one had seen before in the genre. Yet, one also sensed a warm spot for family. He was a little like Clark Griswold. This artist who captured the zeitgeist of the ‘80s teenager so pleasantly, also kept within him a never gone nostalgia for his own 1950s’ and ‘60s childhood and adolescence.

Christmas Vacation was based on a story he wrote entitled Christmas ’59. The original Vacation movie was based on a story he wrote called Vacation ’58 – both of them written for the magazine National Lampoon – the same satirical outfit where comic geniuses like Chase and fellow Saturday Night Live alums Gilda Radner and John Belushi got their start.

In this story, Hughes tapped into something from his own life and yours. Life is too damned serious as we’ve been reminded again this holiday season, so get all the laughs in while you can. Surrounded by your idiosyncratic relatives, watching Christmas Vacation, you can’t go wrong.

One last thing

The older actors and actresses in Christmas Vacation came with impressive credentials, appearing in various films and stage productions over the decades. I was particularly interested to learn that Mae Questel, who played senile Aunt Bethany, was the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, Popeye's girlfriend, in cartoons dating as far back as 1931. Having seen her as an old lady, it was also neat to learn what a dish she was in her young days. Check her out in this musical number with Rudy Vallee, who was like the Elvis of the flapper set.

The Monkees - Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)

2012-04-14T12:42:00.001-07:00

Written by Neil Diamond before he became big as a solo act. Nicely sung by Davy Jones. Sorry we lost him recently.

Sweet Caroline

2012-04-14T10:07:00.002-07:00

Probably my favorite cover version of this classic song. Sung by Bobby Womack.

Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show live 1970

2012-04-14T10:02:00.004-07:00

Evangelical groups tried to have this song banned because they thought it was disrespectful to Christianity. Fortunately, progressive Christian artist Johnny Cash didn't feel that way.

"Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" (Neil Diamond) review

2012-04-14T09:16:00.015-07:00

To hear a Neil Diamond record of circa 1969-70 is to find Middle American peace sign, hitch-hiking, earth-in-balance transcendence. It’s a breaking through of the walls erected to place us all within categories and definitions.

Diamond’s serrated voice on vinyl of that era opens – like sweet blown grass – a window into what my mom would’ve been listening to at the time – somewhere in the cross-cultural bag of the Stones, The Band, Herb Albert & the Tijuana Brass, the Temptations -- in the kitchen of our little house beside a gravel road.

"Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show," the opening title track to Diamond’s 1969 album deserves a listen a listen on your turntable. Put aside the overplay this standard receives on the corporate world’s Oldies and Classic Hits station and hear the song with new ears. Listen to the entire album and put life in its circular perspective.

While none of the other tracks have the ’45 hit single appeal of the opening or its phenomenal closing track – “Sweet Caroline – taken as a whole, the album emanates a breezy, spiritually sound feeling befitting the up-and-coming singer-songwriter of the era --appropriate because Neil Diamond is not conventional pop. Or is he?

Depends on how you define pop music. If your definition is limited by a post-MTV era paradigm of machinery, manufacturing and imagery, then no – Diamond is not standard pop. However, if your understanding has been broadened by 60s era Wall of Sound, Wrecking Crew and the Civil Rights amalgamation of rock n’ roll, soul, pop and country, then Diamond and his band stand with the artists who molded commercial pop with a sense of craftsmanship.

As an ‘80s teen-ager I lacked historical perspective and dismissed Neil Diamond as some adult contemporary wimp liked by old people. Some of that, Diamond brought on himself. “Love on the Rocks.” What the hell is that? “Heartlight” from the E.T. soundtrack? Bland, corporate contrived and uninspired. Like some of the most multi-talented, yet non-purist artists – Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, Elton John – Neil Diamond became more about the name – the brand – than the artistry.

It was only in college during the early ‘90s, while listening to stuff like Sonic Youth, the Pixies, the Jesus and Mary Chain…that I learned Neil Diamond had relevance. That brings me to back to Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show. In January of 1969, after his last two albums failed to chart, Diamond left New York and went to 827 Thomas St. in Memphis, home to American Sound Studio and laid down tracks with the house band, the Memphis Boys. Guided by record producer Chips Moman, the band added a complementary musical groove to Diamond’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

While not as lauded as Stax’s Booker T. and the MG’s, the Memphis Boys were steady and steeped in southern traditions of gospel, soul, rock and country. Having cut his teeth on tunesmithing at New York’s Brill Building in the early 60s, Diamond’s lyrics and music at the end of the decade had the feel of his earlier catchy pop hits like “Cherry, Cherry,” but also revealed the growing introspection that would mark his early ‘70s work.

Bobby Woods played the gospel piano intro to “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” setting the stage for Diamond to enter hot and stoic, vocals steady. Starting soft and slow-ow, like a small earthquake and when he lets go-o, half the valley shakes. The song builds to a crescendo as he narrates a tale, straddling the line of fleshly pleasure and spiritual sensations. Diamond – with strong support from the band –pays homage to southern gospel tradition as only an East Coast Jewish boy, dazzled by the early sounds of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, can.

Tunes like “Dig In” and “Deep in the Morning” are sexy, grooving song with a blues edge driven by Guitarist Reggie Young and bassist Mike Leech. “River Runs, Newgrown Plums” features Bobby Emmons sputtering organ solo (like something traditionally out of a baseball park or ‘70s game show), which sounds a little dated, yet cool considering there’s nothing like it on the radio today. The solo gives the song a special spice. The song has the buoyancy of Diamond’s early hits and the line, “honey, it’s natural, I love you” is a classic Diamond-like lyric of that era. Diamond’s best line in any of the songs is “I’m a ten dollar dreamer” from the song, “Memphis Streets.” With fun lyrics about working the day shift and driving a ’59 Ford, this song – like many on the album -- reflect a young adult sense of freedom and abandon. In no less than three songs, he talks about going barefoot. Girls..God..himself…barefoot by the stream.

"You're So Sweet, Horseflies Keep Hangin' Round Your Face" is a fun parody of a corny country song. The lyrics invoking Kentucky moonshine, front teeth missing, county rodoes..would make this a fun one to sing verbatim from the dance floor of a bar as a band plays. "Long Gone" sounds more like country with accoustic rock guitar, absent parody.

Much of the album’s songs show restlessness, a longing to drift along the roads of America, aimless, carrying a few worldly possessions, while opening up to fresh love and life experience. While the world approaching 1970 was growing rapidly more urban and polluted, there seemed – in Diamond and other artists of the time – a reaching out for that something pure and authentic from the country.

In the ballad “Juliet,” Diamond signs of “wandering around a grown man, no more than a small boy.” The dichotomy is evident in lyrics throughout the album. There’s the youthful frivolity and desire for the road, alongside an underscoring knowledge that it’s not all it promises and the game is almost up. It’s like he sings in “Glory Road” – And I know glory road’s waiting for me, rest my load, now I know glory road won’t set me free. The song, with its Kerouackian references to Colorado, Wyoming, LA, Louisiana…hints at the loneliness Diamond would later explore in “I Am, I Said.”

“And the Grass Won’t Pay You No Mind” is the purest portrait of Diamond’s pop-rock lyricism and maturing song writing talents. An acoustic, country-folk-styled ballad, the song is earthy and poetic, capturing a still moment that had to resonate with young people coming of age in a world of noise and confusion. More than romantic love, the song was downright spiritual. Elvis Presley would cover “And the Grass Won’t Pay You No Mind” a few months later and I’m guessing it’s because he couldn’t resist the opening line, “Listen easy, you can hear God calling.”

Of course, Elvis would be all over Diamond’s smash hit of the year – “Sweet Caroline” – adding the pop-rock smash to his Vegas shows. Originally, not part of the album, its popularity prompted MCA to tack it at the end of side two. Good call. “Sweet Caroline” is a serendipitous work of pop transcendence, an enveloping arch over the waters of human kindness. Sung with confidence, it’s become Diamond’s signature song. Could we imagine Boston’s Fenway Park without it now?

Diamond wrote the song after seeing a picture in Life magazine of Caroline Kennedy riding a horse. Is that not appropriate?

Was not the entire era a musical Camelot?

Gateway Music

Elvis in Memphis -- After completing Diamond’s album at American Sound Studios, Chips Moman and the house rhythm section recorded this album with Presley and the result was artistic, commercial sophistication – “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds”... Soulful, poignant and muscular, this album – with the right mix of professionals – brought Presley back to his roots and rescued his career and talents from Hollywood kitschdom. Just as Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show prompts us to see Neil Diamond beyond the Desiree-like Vegas sequins, this album shows Elvis beyond ersatz soundtracks and Liberace bombast.

Dusty in Memphis – A must for any record collection. Like the aforementioned Presley and Diamond, Dusty Springfield’s career was lagging when she recorded in Memphis’s American Sound Studios. And like those guys, her career and talents were injected with new vigor. A British pop diva, she traveled across the pond to work with musicians who would fuel her work with a soulfulness they had lent to Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Tommy Cogbill, who helped produce and contribute bass lines on Diamond’s album played the classic, sexy bass intro we all know from “Son of a Preacher Man.” Without this white English girl’s homage to black soul music, we would have no Amy Winehouse or Adele.

Just look for music everywhere from these Memphis musicians and producers. Their handiwork crossed genres and decades – Gene Vincent, Carla Thomas, the Box Tops, Sly and the Family Stone, Tammy Wynette, B.J. Thomas…Chips Moman wrote “Luckenbauch, Texas" for Waylon and Willie. The list goes on and the hunt can only be a thrill.

Outside the box gateway
As a young man, Neil Diamond received a scholarship to be on New York University’s fencing team. No way, I can resist recommending one of my favorite books by one of my favorite all-time authors -- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield was manager of his prep school’s fencing team. Everyone in the world knows that, I’m sure.

"The Dream" review

2012-01-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

Drew D. Hansen’s book, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation is a fascinating examination of King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Hansen presents the human story behind MLK’s spectacular address, rescuing the speech -- as King -- from their mythic pedestal.

King famously disregarded his notes that August day in 1963 when he came to the “I have a dream” portion of his speech, spoken spontaneously. Hansen shows, however, that King’s poetic words had been in his creative arsenal for some time. They were the products of references he had gathered over the years, variations of which he had already used in sermons before black church audiences in the South.

The most interesting aspect of Hansen’s book is the detective work he did in tracing the origins of King’s references. King’s writing and oratorical style was influenced by other theologians and poetry, but most of all, by the King James Bible.

Hansen lists several Bible verses, from which King drew allusions, in his famous speech. Psalm, Isaiah, Matthew…the speech drew from a rich array of scriptural sources. Hansen juxtaposes King’s metaphors with their Biblical sources. King quoted directly from Amos 5:24, with the words “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The “I have a dream” phrase could have been derived from several Biblical passages to a “dream” or “vision” in the Old Testament. But it also could have been lifted from things he had heard from people in his congregation, as well as from a religious vision King described having around the time of the Montgomery, Ala. Bus boycott in 1956.

“’I had a vision’ could easily have become ‘I had a dream,” Hansen writes.

The image of King delivering an emotional plea for interracial brotherhood upon the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is the defining moment of the Civil Rights Era. However, as Hansen shows, the iconography of the moment has led to a watered-down version of the Civil Rights Movement.

Today on MLK Day, politicians can point to the federal legislation that ended Jim Crow in the South and say King’s dream has come true. Mission accomplished. The mythology surrounding the “I have a dream” King glosses over his final years and the battles he didn’t win. Hansen reminds us that the full history isn’t so neat and tidy.

“Remembering King through the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech allowed the nation to tell itself a comforting, but inaccurate story about King’s legacy,” Hansen writes.

The Black Power moment sprang from growing discontentment with King’s philosophy of non-violence and interracial brotherhood. King’s successes in the South had not carried over into solving the more subtle effects of racism found in the inner city slums of cities like Chicago and Detroit. A new crop of African-American leaders mocked King for having a “dream,” while they were living a nightmare.

By the late ‘60s, King had broadened his mission, speaking out against poverty and the Vietnam War. Today, King’s vision of an age free of income inequality and imperialism remain the part of his dream that has been deferred.

Hansen places King’s dream in context. He acknowledges that in ways it remains unfulfilled, yet reminds us of the gratitude we should feel for the miracles that MLK and thousands of Civil Rights workers have helped accomplish.

“In just under a decade, the civil rights movement brought down a system that had stood essentially unaltered since Reconstruction,” Hansen writes. “King’s dreams of an America free from racial discrimination are still some distance away, but it is astounding how far the nation has come since that hot August day in 1963.”

Hopefully, this history will provide hope in the work still before us.

jguyreview: "Make Way for Ducklings" review

2011-09-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

jguyreview: "Make Way for Ducklings" review

"Make Way for Ducklings" review

2011-09-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

Writer’s note: I recently heard a story on NPR about how 2011 marks the 70th anniversary of Robert McCloskey’s Caldecott Award winning children’s classic, Make Way for Ducklings. So I'm submitting a review of the book that I wrote for a Children’s Literature class I took a few years ago. From time to time, I’ll submit other children’s book reviews I handed in for the class. As readers of this blog know, I have my own style of review writing, but I was required to write in a certain style and I’m going to post what I turned in.

Also, I’m too lazy to change them.

McCloskey, Robert. Make Way for Ducklings. New York: The Viking Press, 1941.

Audience: Ages 3 to 8

Genre: Traditional Fantasy

Summary: A duck couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, look for a place to live and raise a family. They settle in a pond at Boston’s Public Gardens, but decide the place is too wild and crowded for babies so they search for a new home. They settle along the Charles River where Mrs. Mallard hatches eight ducklings. She prepares the children to live in the city, while Mr. Mallard flies out to explore the river. Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings have to dodge the bustling traffic as they walk back to the Public Gardens. A kindly policeman halts traffic and calls for police back-up so the family can safely make their way home where they are reunited with their husband and father.

Themes: There is the idea of searching for and finding a home, a place where a family can feel safe and secure. The theme of family stability is demonstrated in the care Mr. and Mrs. Mallard give to finding a home to start their family and in the way Mrs. Mallard nurtures her ducklings. The police officer’s assistance to the duck family illustrates the theme of helping others in need, particularly those who are different from us and tend to get overlooked. McCloskey suggests stepping back from our busy pace and considering the needs of others.

Curriculum Connections: I see this as a story that would be read to kids in around the first grade so I would make the curriculum simple. Ask the children if this is a fiction or non-fiction book. After establishing that the book is fiction, ask the kids if anything about Mr. and Mrs. Mallard and their ducklings reminds them of their own family. Take a few suggestions from the children. Then model for the children a picture a picture you drew of your own family and tell how it is similar to Make Way for Ducklings. For example, it could be a picture illustrating a mother (or father) taking care of the children by reading them a story or tucking them in bed at night. After students make their own drawings, give each child an opportunity to show his or her drawing to the class and talk about it.

Reader Response: I found Make Way for Ducklings to be a charming, endearing story, the kind that never grows old. The brown charcoaled pencil drawings evoke autumn on the East Coast during the 1940s. These images often have a comical flair, the best picture being the one in which the police officer stops traffic while the duck family crosses the street. This was a fun book to read to my kids.

Technology Connection: The following link provides an activity guide that includes lesson plan ideas for building cognition by putting story events in sequence and emphasizing vocabulary words in the story. There are also ideas on integrative curriculum, connecting the story with music, art and science. http://www.liveoakmedia.com/client/guides/27319.pdfThis web link contains a brief art lesson plan for “egg carton ducks.” Other ideas integrate art with social studies by having students draw places named in the story and identifying them on a map of Boston. A similar idea is for children to make a chart showing the differences between a city, suburban and rural area. http://www.teachervision.fen.com/fiction/activity/1733.html?detoured=1

Gateway Reading: After Make Way for Ducklings, you have to read McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal. It’s a beautiful story and an even better book. Both children’s books are classics and Caldecott Award winners – Ducklings winning the prize in 1942 and Blueberries in 1948.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Pape...

2011-06-17T16:36:00.000-07:00