Showing posts with label American music history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American music history. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

The Traveling Wilburys "The End Of The Line"

By Jack Brummet, Rock Editor

This is a most bittersweet video.  Somewhere between the time when they recorded this originally, and when they shot the video, Lefty Wilbury a/k/a Roy Orbison, passed on (his name is a tribute to country great Lefty Frizzell).  This video shows Orbison's guitar rocking in a chair as the rest of the group play, followed by a brief shot focused on a framed picture of Roy.


 Copyright (C) 2012 by All This Is That. All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.  license 
---o0o---

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Lefty Wilbury a/k/a Roy Orbison & The Traveling Wilbury's perform "Not Alone Anymore"

By Jack Brummet, Rock Editor

Roy had one of the great voices in music. In the last couple years of his life, had an amazing resurgence/comeback, in part by hooking up with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and the great performer and producer Jeff Lynne (whom Roy called his best producer ever). This song, recorded in his last year on earth (age 52), is one of his best ever. He transcended devastating tragedies in his personal life and soldiered on to make some of his best music ever. I still miss this guy.




While we're here, here is a video of Handle Me With Care, which is a great song in itself, but all the more memorable to see all these legends making serious music together.


---o0o---

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Music in NYC 1972-1977


I am reading a fascinating book about the NYC music scene from 1972-1977--Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.  I arrived in NYC in '77.  The book details the emergence of hip hop and rap, the loft jazz scene, salsa, punk, the new serious music a/k/a/ classical of Steven Reich and Phillip Glass, and the new wave.  

It was pretty cool to be there and catch the tail end of it.  Anyhow, this reminded me of one night in 1977 when Kev Francis Aloysius Curran and I went to the opening of Hilly Crystal's new club in the East Village, CBGB 2nd Avenue, in an old Yiddish theater on 2nd Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets.  On the bill that night: The Talking Heads, The Ramones, Television, and Blondie.  The Hell's Angels, who lived across 3rd street from my future brother in law Colin, were out front of the theatre selling acid and nickel bags. The theater was almost 2,000 seats...way bigger than CBGBs proper.   Looking at who was playing, it's just stunning that it wasn't a sell out.  OK, rambling now. 

One of the most interesting facts in the book I'm reading is that the Talking Heads lived three doors up from our loft at 181 Chrystie Street in the East Village.  Keelin and I sublet a place there for three or four months.  I never saw any signs of the Heads, but we saw a lot of other weird stuff.   I still often listen to the Heads, Ramones, Blondie, and other bands from back then, but tonight I went back and listened to a couple of my Television CDs.  I'd forgotten just how good these guys were. . .

---o0o---

Friday, September 21, 2012

The Ink Spots "video" of Shout Brother Shout, with some amazing dancing

By Jack Brummet, American Music Editor

The Ink Spots music is, as always, great, but this clip is really about the dancing. I don't know a lot about dance (other than having attended a couple of modern and ballet performances), but this video must be some of the inspiration of Michael Jackson's moonwalking.  Or maybe dancers have always done this...because it always just looks so cool.



Copyright (C) 2012 by All This Is That. All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).
---o0o---

Friday, August 03, 2012

Nils Lofgren and Grin perform "Rusty Gun"

By Jack Brummet, Music Editor

I heart Nils Lofgren. He started the band Grin not long after he worked on Neil Young's first album with Crazy Horse.  Grin never got any traction and although every one of their releases was critically acclaimed, their records stiffed, but me and my friendos latched on and loved them.  After Grin fell apart, Nils did some solo work, and then joined forces with that mighty juggernaut Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, where he has played every since.  He joined Young's band when he was 17, and played piano and guitar on After The Gold Rush and on the album I consider Young's masterpiece, Tonight's The Night.  I love this guy.  I think I need to post a clip of some of his E Street stage antics (e.g., performing a somersault on stage whilst playing a solo).  The Boss and the E Street band are back on the road this summer, and will probably be lining up some fall dates stateside. . .

On this song, it must be Nils playing the accordion.  I know he learned to play one when he was five years old., and studied it for ten years.  He's been a member of The E Street Band, with their ups and downs, since 1984 (he replaced Steven Van Zandt [a/k/a The Sopranos Silvio Dante], although Little Steven returned and now he AND Nils are permanent member of the band).  TMI?


---o0o---

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Happy 70th birthday to Jerry Garcia

By Jack Brummet, Music History Editor


Today would have been Jerry Garcia's 70th birthday. . .if only.  Here is a photo from the last time I saw him, with the Grateful Dead, at Seattle's Memorial Stadium on May 26, 1995.  He died two months later, at the age of 53.

---o0o---

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Happy 100th Birthday to Woodie Guthrie: ATIT Reheated - "I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life"

By Jack Brummet, Music and Society Editor


Woody Guthrie was a great man, and a great writer. Yeah, I didn't say great singer, but I like his singing. Any fool can get all Frenchified and rococo. It takes a genius to get simple. This genius fled Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the 30’s and became famous a few years later for his songs Dust Bowl Ballads. For most of the rest of his life he would be a roamer and a troubadour. He is one of the great American songwriters, right up there in the pantheon with Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and others. He may be at the top of the rockpile. . .in my booklet, at least.

Woody Guthrie loved America as deeply as anyone ever has. He thrived on the people and the idiom. We remember him mainly for his songs, but he was also a wonderful writer. You may have heard his songs like So Long It’s Been Good To Know You, I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore, Dust Can’t Kill Me, Union Maid, Reuben James, Planewreck At Los Gatos, and over a thousand more songs.

He hit 46 of these United States, usually with just his guitar and a toothbrush. One of the songs inspired by a trip, This Land Is Your Land, should probably be the national anthem. Woody’s influence has been monolithic, although most of us have only experienced Woody absorbed and filtered through Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, or Wilco, among hundreds of others. His work has been passed down through cultural osmosis.

When the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) began collecting names and driving the blacklisting, Woody was not afraid. He had nothing to hide, and the committee, like the dust, couldn’t kill him.

Some people considered The B.P.A. and the Grand Coulee Dam tributes to an "experiment in American socialism." These huge public works projects were "a revolutionary slap at the private enterprise system." Guthrie’s Columbia River songs reflect his optimism the dam would bring an increased standard of living to the people. One of Guthrie’s most famous songs, Pastures of Plenty, presents an idealist's vision of public irrigation and electrification:
I think of the dust and the days that are gone,
And the day that’s to come on a farm of our own;
One turn of the wheel and the waters will flow
‘Cross the green growing field, down the hot thirsty row.


Look down in the canyon and there you will see
The Grand Coulee shower her blessings on me;
The lights for the city for factory, and mill,
Green Pastures of Plenty from dry barren hills.

Woody was profoundly shocked by what happened to the poor Okies who left the Dust Bowl for California, by how they were killed, beaten and starved out by the State Police and farm owners. Something had gone very wrong with this great country. His song about Pretty Boy Floyd summed up his feelings:
Now as through this world I ramble
I’ve seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
But as through this life you travel
And as through this life you roam,

You’ll never see an outlaw
Drive a family from its home.
Woody believed the Great Depression and dust bowl were caused by the Big Boss Man and King Coal. He wasn’t singing anymore about lost love; he was pointing fingers.

One night, on a radio show, he hit it on the head:


"A policeman will just stand there and let a banker rob a farmer or a financier rob a working man. But if a farmer robs a banker, you would have a whole army of cops out shooting at him. Robbery is a chapter of etiquette.”
Woody Guthrie was a patriot, but he was no Democrat. As he said in that same radio broadcast:
“I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.”
By 1947, Woody was working on his second marriage, to Marjorie. Between his travel and performances, he lived with her and his daughter Cathy Ann in Brooklyn. Woody nicknamed her Stackabones, and wrote his famous children’s songs for (and with) her:
Why can’t a dish break a hammer?
Why, or why, oh why?
Because a hammer’s
got a pretty hard head.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

Why can’t a bird
break an elephant?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because an elephant’s got a
pretty hard skin.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

He published stories about Stackabones. Cathy Ann was very much like Woody, singing, rhyming, and always playing with words. One day her dress caught on fire and she was badly burned. She was singing when Woody got to the hospital, but she died that night.


Woody sat down and wrote: “And the things you fear most shall surely come upon you.” It seemed like everyone he ever loved was doomed to go up in flames. There were fires in his childhood. The brand new family house had burned down. His sister Nora died when her dress caught fire. Just she and her mother were at home. She was singing when Woody saw her in the hospital too. There were many rumors about her death. There were other fires. And there was his mother’s problem. After her daughter died, she became more and more nervous and remote until finally she spent all her days wandering through town like she was lost. No one knew what to do.

There was another fire. Woody’s mother was holding a kerosene lamp and when his father woke up, he was on fire.

When Woody came home the next day after a visit with relatives, a neighbor told him his father was in the hospital and his mother had been put in an insane asylum. In his wonderful book Bound For Glory, he compared his own restlessness and nervousness to his mother’s condition.

After the death of Stackabones, Woody lost his spark. He and Marjorie soon had other children (including Arlo), but he never took the same interest. He had become unpredictable. He still wrote hundreds of pages each week, and always had new songs in the works. But they weren’t like the old ones. He just couldn’t concentrate anymore.


A painting of Woody at the Columbia dam,
about which he wrote some of his greatest
songs

Marjorie forced him to move out when he attacked their son Arlo one day. Woody went into the hospital to cure himself of alcoholism, and a young doctor figured out his problem. He asked Woody questions about his parents and grandparents, and diagnosed him with Huntington’s Chorea, called chorea because of the violent dance-like movements of its victims (the root of the word choreography). Huntington’s Chorea is an inherited degenerative disease and a victim’s offspring stand a fifty-fifty chance of getting the disease. The course of the illness is long and savage.

The changes in Woody occurred so slowly that few of his friends really noticed. Almost everyone chalked it up to drink, or said “Well, that’s just Woody. That’s the way he walks and talks." Some people avoided him now. He slurred his words and staggered and was becoming less and less capable of working at all.


Bob Dylan's copy of Woody's Book
Bound For Glory


When Woody was trying to concentrate, he wrote his name everywhere. . .on walls, on people’s books, on pieces of paper. Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. It was almost as if he was trying to convince himself he really DID exist.

One day he was lighting a fire and the gas can exploded. His arm could no longer hold a guitar very well.

Woody checked into the State Hospital in Queens, and with the exception of visits with friends on weekends, he lived there the rest of his life.

His son, the musician Arlo Guthrie talked about him to Rolling Stone magazine:


“I remember him coming home from the hospital and taking me out to the backyard, just him and me, and teaching me the last verses to This Land Is Your Land because he thinks if I don’t learn them no one will remember. He can barely strum a guitar now and—can you imagine?—his friends think he’s crazy or drunk and they stick him in a green room with all these crazy people…”

“All of a sudden everyone is singing his songs. Kids are singing This Land Is Your Land in school and people are talking about making it the national anthem. Bob Dylan and the others are copying him. And he can’t react to it. Here’s the guy who had all these words and now that he’s really big, he can’t say anything.”

Only Shakespeare could write something that terrible. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie died in 1967, in his fifties. Some experts believe the disease may have enhanced his rhyminess and wordplay, and acted as a creative spur like alcohol and drugs have worked on others.

As the cells died in his brain, it rewired itself, forcing new and wonderful pathways between the nerve synapses. This also led to the not-so-wonderful behavior his family and friends saw. Just like his mother. Starved from all that work, his nerves short-circuited.

Woody and the disease are so bound up together, it’s hard to know where it started and Woody began. No one really knows if the disease starts when you are 14, or in your later years. It cannot be cured. It cannot be predicted in advance. Research is ongoing now, mainly because of what happened to Woody.

Most importantly, of course, is not the disease, but his music and his books. When we sing his most famous song, we sing the first verses. The last verses he tried to teach Arlo are probably politically pink at best, and they were the ones Woody hoped would survive:
In the squares of the city by the shadow of the steeple,
Near the relief office I saw my people
And some were stumbling and some were wondering if
This land was made for you and me.

As I went rambling that dusty highway
I saw a sign that said Private Property
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
Some of the photographs and images of Woody are copyrighted and unlicensed. However, the individual who uploaded this work to Wikipedia, and first used it in an article, as well as subsequent persons who place it into articles, asserts that this use qualifies as fair use of the material under United States copyright law. All This Is That is using the photo under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright act as well, as those provisions apply to scholarly work.
---o0o---

All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Add Some Music To Your Day!

By Jack Brummet, Music Editor


The Beach Boys' fine song Add Some Music [to your day]. . .with lyrics.  They each take a turn on the vocal lead in the tune.  This is from their later, uneven, but fascinating album Sunflower, not long after they'd largely abandoned singing songs of surfing, teen love, and cars.






ADD SOME MUSIC [TO YOUR DAY] (B.Wilson/J.Knott/M.Love) 


The sunday mornin' gospel goes good with the soul
There's blues, folk, and country, and rock like a rollin' stone
The world could come together as one
If everybody under the sun
Add some music to your day
(Add some music, add some add some music to your day)

You'll hear it while you're walkin' by a neighbor's home
You'll hear it faintly in the distance when you're on the phone
You're sittin' in a dentist's chair
And they've got music for you there
To add some music
To your day

Add some music music everywhere
Add some add some add some add some music
Your doctor knows it keeps you calm
Your preacher adds it to his psalms
So add some music
To your day

Music
When you're alone
Is like a companion
For your lonely soul

When day is over
I close my tired eyes 
Music is in my soul

At a movie you can feel it touching your heart
And on every day of the summertime
You'll hear children chasing ice cream carts
They'll play it on your wedding day
There must be 'bout a million ways
To add some music
To your day

Add some music to your day 
---o0o---


Saturday, May 26, 2012

Right Now by Paloma Ford

By Jack Brummet, Music Editor 

A first single from Paloma Ford's forthcoming album has just been released. Listen in, and buy the CD when it is released.  Full disclosure:  Paloma is my niece.

 

A recent photo taken with Nas:

A photo of my daughter Claire and Paloma on the Seattle waterfront in the late 80's.

---o0o---

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Send good thoughts to the American music icon Levon Helm

By Mona Goldwater, Jack Brummet, and Pablo Fanque


ATIT sends love and prayers to Levon Helm, a great drummer, singer, mandolin player, writer, and spirit, whose music deeply moved us and carried us through many happy and not so happy times, and who helped transform our music, all for the good. 


From Levonhelm.com:

"Dear Friends, 


"Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey. 


"Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration... he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage...


"We appreciate all the love and support and concern. 


"From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy" 
---o0o---

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

ATIT Reheated: An open letter to my teenage son

By Jack Brummet, Music Editor




[From All This Is That, Friday, January 06, 2006]


No wonder we were crazy in the 60's. This "song" was a big hit on AM radio. A lot of parents thought it was a smart piece of writing (as opposed to, say, smarmy, reactionary claptrap). It was just flat depressing. But then that's the way it was. I remember a lot of heated arguments with angry adults, and teachers and Sunday school teachers over the war and protesting and burning draft cards. I even witnessed an actual father-son fight over the war.   It was especially strange since this song co-existed on the radio, and the charts, with a lot of amazing music.

The first part of the song, you think, "yeah, this guy is talking sense here."   But then, after a couple of minutes, he gets down to business.  And it is ugly business.  



An Open Letter To My Teenage Son


by Victor Lundberg

Dear Son:

You ask my reaction to long hair or beards on young people
Some great men have worn long hair and beards
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
If to you long hair or a beard is a symbol of independence
If you believe in your heart that the principles of this country
Our heritage, is worthy of this display of pride
That all men shall remain free
That free men at all times will not inflict their personal limitations
Of achievement on others,
That demands your own rights as well as the rights of others
And be willing to fight for this right, you have my blessings

You ask that I not judge you merely as a teenager
To judge you on your own personal habits, abilities and goals
This is a fair request and I promise that I will not judge any person
Only as a teenager if you will constantly remind yourself that some of my
generation judge people by their race, their belief or the color
of their skin and that this is no more right than saying all
teenagers are drunken dope addicts or glue sniffers
If you will judge every human being on his own individual potential
I will do the same.

You ask me if God is dead
This is a question each individual must answer within himself
But a warm summer day with all its brightness
All its sound, all its exhilarating breathiness just happened
God is love. Remember that God is a guide and not a storm trooper
Realize that many of the past and present generation
Because of a well intended but unjustifiable misconception
Have attempted to legislate morality
This created part of the basis
For your generation's need to rebel against our society
With this knowledge perhaps your children will never ask
Is God dead?
I sometimes think much of mankind is attempting to work Him to death

You ask my opinion of draft card burners. I would answer this way
All past wars have been dirty, unfair, immoral, bloody and second-guessed
However, history has shown most of them necessary
If you doubt that our free enterprise system
In the United States is worth protecting, if you doubt the principles
Upon which this country was founded, that we remain free to choose our religion
Our individual endeavors, our method of government
If you doubt that each free individual in this great country
should reap rewards commensurate only with his own efforts
Than it is doubtful you belong here

If you doubt that people who govern us
Should be selected by their desire
To allow us to strive for any goal we feel capable of obtaining
Than its doubtful you should participate in their selection
If you are not grateful to a country
That gave your father the opportunity to work
For his family to give you the things you have and you do not feel pride
Enough to fight for your right to continue in this
Manner than I assume the blame for your failure
To recognize the true value of our birthright

And I will remind you that your mother will love
you no matter what you do, because she is a woman
And I love you too son
But I also love our country and the principles for which we stand
And if you decide to burn your draft card
then burn your birth certificate at the same time
From that moment on, I have no son.
---o0o---

All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

nothing can hurt me: the Big Star story (trailer)

A trailer from a forthcoming documentary on the legendary band Big Star. The trailer itself has some great footage of the survivors talking about Big Star and Alex Chilton. . . /jack


---o0o---

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Marvin Gaye "heard it through the grapevine" hit No. 1 on the charts 43 years ago today::::::How Marvin changed the music biz

By Jack Brummet, Music History Editor


43 years ago today, in 1968, Marvin Gaye hit No. 1 on the charts with "I Heard It Through The Grapevine," one of the great R&B songs of all time, and the biggest selling Motown single up to then.

MG also changed the way that corner of the music business worked.  He controlled the recording and arrangements of the song, and along with Buddy Holly, Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, and other makers and creators, broke the crooked--and stifling--music business system where artists ("talent") were robots, answering to the producers and A&R men.  MG's album "What's Goin' On?" with its sweet melange of of funk, jazz, and Latin soul was a strident departure from the Motown Sound, and was Motown's first really autonomous work, made without the "help" of Motown's staff producers, A&R men, or Barry Gordy himself.


---o0o---

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Dead/Elvis (Elvis Costello plays and sings with Grateful Dead successors Furthur)

By Jack Brummet
Rock Editor

click to enlarge

On 3/27/11, at Radio City Music Hall, Elvis Costello and his wife Diane Krall, sat in with Furthur (the Dead) and sang “Tennessee Jed,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Ship of Fools” > “Must’ve Been the Roses” > “Ship of Fools.” In the same show, Larry Campbell sings The Band’s “Chest Fever” and plays guitar and violin on a number of tunes.



Diana Krall, sings “Ripple” to end the first set and in the second set sings (and plays piano on) “Chest Fever” in the encore. Campbell’s wife, Teresa Williams, sings “Sunrise” in a second set that also includes “Uncle John’s,” “St. Stephen,” “Unbroken Chain,” “Morning Dew” and, to end the evening, “Attics of My Life” (with Teresa and Elvis in the chorus).

You can stream or download an audience tape of this show here.     The show is not currently available for sale from Further or Dead.net.
---o0o---

Monday, August 22, 2011

47 years ago today, The Beatles first played Seattle and fished from their hotel room window

Three bucks!



By Jack Brummet
Rock Editor

47 years ago today, The Beatles first appeared in Seattle at the Seattle Center Coliseum (now called The Arena) and fished from their hotel room at The Edgewater Inn.  According to an article by Greg Lange and Alan J. Stein on historylink.org:


"That evening, the opening acts took to the stage beginning at 8:00 p.m. At 9:25 disc jockey Pat O’Day from radio station KJR, Seattle's leading Rock and Roll station, introduced the Beatles. The crowd went wild.
















Ringo fishes from his hotel room at The Edgewater Inn on Elliott Bay


"Screaming fans made the noise in the Coliseum deafening and few if any could hear the songs. The Beatles played: "All My Lovin’," "Twist and Shout," "You Can’t Do That," "She Loves You," "Can’t Buy Me Love," "If I Fell In Love With You," "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "Boys" (sung solo by Ringo Starr), and "Roll Over Beethoven." They ended the concert with "Long Tall Sally."

"During the concert, hundreds of teenage girls rushed the stage in the hopes of catching the eyes of their idols. Police and firefighters did their best to prevent injuries, but 35 people required first aid treatment, ranging from bumps and bruises to all-out hysteria. One girl was restrained on a stretcher, all the while screaming "Paul! I love you!"

"The Beatles waited an hour before leaving the Coliseum in the rear of an ambulance that returned them to the heavily guarded Edgewater Inn on the waterfront. They earned $34,569 for their performance."

I got to see them there two years later, when I was 13.  That was one of their final shows.  After leaving Seattle, they played two shows in California, and never played in public again except for the famous rooftop concert around their album.
---o0o---

Monday, June 20, 2011

Thank you Clarence "Big Man" Clemons for all the music

Clarence Clemons died this weekend, after he suffered a massive stroke last week.  He was a sweet man, and one of the heart and souls of the E Street Band.  I fell in love with his work in the summer of 1977, around the time I visited Asbury Park for the first time.  RIP.


---o0o---

Sunday, June 19, 2011

happy 69th birthday to Brian Wilson (with his rare version of God Only Knows and Your Imagination)

Happy 69th birthday Brian Wilson (no, not the closer!).






Brian's solo song Your Imagination--he does all 60 vocal parts.  It's all him!


Outtake-- Brian sings lead (Carl sang lead on the released version)
---o0o---

Friday, January 06, 2006

An Open Letter To My Teenage Son

No wonder we were crazy in the 60s. This "song" was a big hit on AM radio. A lot of parents thought it was a smart piece of writing (as opposed to, say, smarmy, reactionary claptrap). It was just flat depressing. But then that's the way it was. I remember a lot of heated arguments with angry adults, and teachers and Sunday school teachers over the war and protesting and burning draft cards. I even witnessed an actual father-son fight over the war. I tracked the song down to http://www.fugly.com. You can listen to it on your PC, or download it... Click here to listen.


An Open Letter To My Teenage Son
by Victor Lundberg

Dear son:

You ask my reaction to long hair or beards on young people
Some great men have worn long hair and beards
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
If to you long hair or a beard is a symbol of independence
If you believe in your heart that the principles of this country
Our heritage, is worthy of this display of pride
That all men shall remain free
That free men at all times will not inflict their personal limitations
Of achievement on others,
That demands your own rights as well as the rights of others
And be willing to fight for this right, you have my blessings

You ask that I not judge you merely as a teenager
To judge you on your own personal habits, abilities and goals
This is a fair request and I promise that I will not judge any person
Only as a teenager if you will constantly remind yourself that some of my
generation judge people by their race, their belief or the color
of their skin and that this is no more right than saying all
teenagers are drunken dope addicts or glue sniffers
If you will judge every human being on his own individual potential
I will do the same.

You ask me if God is dead
This is a question each individual must answer within himself
But a warm summer day with all its brightness
All its sound, all its exhilarating breathiness just happened
God is love. Remember that God is a guide and not a storm trooper
Realize that many of the past and present generation
Because of a well intended but unjustifiable misconception
Have attempted to legislate morality
This created part of the basis
For your generation's need to rebel against our society
With this knowledge perhaps your children will never ask
Is God dead?
I sometimes think much of mankind is attempting to work Him to death

You ask my opinion of draft card burners. I would answer this way
All past wars have been dirty, unfair, immoral, bloody and second-guessed
However, history has shown most of them necessary
If you doubt that our free enterprise system
In the United States is worth protecting, if you doubt the principles
Upon which this country was founded, that we remain free to choose our religion
Our individual endeavors, our method of government
If you doubt that each free individual in this great country
should reap rewards commensurate only with his own efforts
Than it is doubtful you belong here

If you doubt that people who govern us
Should be selected by their desire
To allow us to strive for any goal we feel capable of obtaining
Than its doubtful you should participate in their selection
If you are not grateful to a country
That gave your father the opportunity to work
For his family to give you the things you have and you do not feel pride
Enough to fight for your right to continue in this
Manner than I assume the blame for your failure
To recognize the true value of our birthright

And I will remind you that your mother will love
you no matter what you do, because she is a woman
And I love you too son
But I also love our country and the principles for which we stand
And if you decide to burn your draft card
then burn your birth certificate at the same time
From that moment on, I have no son
---o0o---