Tony Bennett, born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Astoria, Queens ninety years ago yesterday, will appear on stage with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall on September 14. Meanwhile, he will appear at the Fox Theater in Detroit on August 12 and at the Ravinia Pavilion in Highland Park, Illinois on August 13. In October, he'll be back on the road, performing at the Rama Casino Resort in Ontario, Canada on the seventh and the following night in the Kodak Hall at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York. On the 23rd he'll be at The Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California and on the 28th at Overture Hall in Madison, Wisconsin. Not bad for a nonagenarian!
The photo shows him in profile, in 1964 with the composer Harold Arlen.
My choice of a song to commemorate this event is perhaps a banal one, but I love the song anyway. The clip below shows him singing it at the sprightly age of 85:
Addendum: I've now learned, thanks to the Brooklyn Eagle, that the song was written right here in Brooklyn Heights by an expatriate San Franciscan gay couple who were feeling homesick. The story of how Bennett picked it up, and made the couple rich enough to move home, is wonderful.
Photo by CBS Television (eBay item photo front photo back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This, I'm sad to write, is another TBT/RIP. Merle Haggard died on his 79th birthday, Wednesday, April 6, 2016.
As the Times obit tells it, he was a California native who spent his first few years living in an abandoned boxcar his father had fixed up during the depression years as a family home. His teens and early adulthood were marked by scrapes with the law, culminating in 1957 in his his being sent to San Quentin Prison for burglary.
He was paroled in 1960, and went on to become one of country music's most influential stars. Early on, he worked with Wynn Stewart, a Missouri native who moved to California and was the first exponent of what came to be called the "Bakersfield Sound", named for a city near the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, north of Los Angeles. Country music from Bakersfield was more hard-edged than that coming from Nashville at the time, when Nashville was trying to broaden its appeal with what guitar wizard and producer Chet Atkins called "countrypolitan". Bakersfield music provided the roots for what in the late 1970s was called "outlaw" country, exemplified by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, along with Merle.
According to the Times obit, Merle included among his influences Lefty Frizzell, who gave Merle's career a boost by inviting him onstage after hearing him sing along from the audience; Elvis Presley; Jimmie "The Yodeling Brakeman" Rodgers, considered one of the founders of modern country music; Chuck Berry; and the King of Texas Swing, Bob Wills.
He influenced many, including Waylon and Willie, and my great favorite, Gram Parsons. The song in the clip above, "Sing Me Back Home", one that Merle wrote based on a prison experience, I first heard sung by Gram with the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Goodbye, Merle. I like thinking that you, Waylon, and Ol' Possum George Jones are singing great harmony now.
Photo at the top of this post is public domain: Merle Haggard dressed for Kennedy Center Honors at the White House, December 2010.
Antoine "Fats" Domino turned 88 on February 28. He was an early (1986) inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and had more hit records than any other of the first generation of rockers except Elvis. He was feared dead after he and his wife refused to evacuate their New Orleans house before Hurricane Katrina struck, but they were rescued by helicopter and taken to shelter. He no longer leaves his native city, but has performed there on occasion in recent years.
When I looked for a clip of the song below, a 1960 hit that I remember fondly, my search term was "Hello Josephine", the song's opening words. I immediately found the clip of a live performance, which has the same words in its caption. Some research showed that the song's actual title was "My Girl Josephine". This seems odd, as the words "my girl" don't appear anywhere in the lyrics. Indeed, the song implies that Josephine is anything but the singer's "girl" at the time of their encounter, evidently many years after what seems to have been a lopsided childhood friendship in which the singer's devotion was not reciprocated.
It's that time of year--pitchers and catchers reported today. So, what could I choose for my TBT but this John Fogerty classic. The clip below, produced by John himself, has audio of the song as recorded for the album that bears its name, accompanied by a montage of still photos and short videos from what those of my generation remember as the baseball of our childhood and youth. Alas, no Mets, though we see their predecessors, the Brooklyn Dodgers, featuring Jackie Robinson, and the New York Giants. We also see my wife's beloved Red Sox, with a shot of the "Splendid Splinter", Ted Williams. To top things off, we see President Dwight D. Eisenhower grinning broadly after throwing the first pitch of some season in the 1950s.
My TBTs of late have, sadly, been mostly about the recently late. Dan Hicks, who died last Saturday, was a musician of great talent and imagination. His roots were in folk, but he became a member of the Charlatans, regarded by many as the first of the San Francisco Bay Area's "psychedelic" bands. He left them to form Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks, a group that had a syncretic style Hicks called "folk swing". The clip below shows them performing two songs, "By Hook or By Crook" and "Shorty Falls in Love" (a.k.a. "Another Night"). Hicks does vocals and guitar, accompanied by the "Lickettes" Maryann Price and Naomi Eisenberg, with Sid Page on violin, John Girton on guitar, and Jaime Leopold on bass.
Bob Elliott, best known as half of the radio comedy duo Bob and Ray (at left in photo from FamousFix) died on Tuesday. His partner, Ray Goulding, died in 1990. They were both Massachusetts natives, and their comedy had a deadpan New England quality. Their radio skits often took the form of an interview that would go spectacularly wrong, as in "The Slow Talker", one of their most popular routines, heard in the clip below:
Richie Havens (1941-2013), a Brooklyn native who "brought an earthy soulfulness to the folk scene of the Sixties" (David Browne, Rolling Stone), opened the Woodstock festival in the summer of 1969. He wasn't meant to, but the band Sweetwater, scheduled to be the opening act, was stuck in traffic. He sang until he ran out of songs, but then began strumming his guitar vigorously and chanting "Freedom!" over and over, before segueing into the traditional spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child".
While I was at the Cosmic American Music Festival last September, I met (and heard some terrific music by) Walter Parks, who played lead guitar in Havens's group until the singer's death. Walter showed me a guitar, showing marks of hard use, that had belonged to Havens, and which he planned to take to the Brooklyn Lutherie for restoration. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to get a photo.
I'll confess: in my twenties and early thirties I was an Eagles fan. "Take it Easy", the first song I heard by them, was aspirational; yes, I wanted to be that guy in Winslow getting the eye from a girl in a flatbed Ford. "Peaceful Easy Feeling" had a similar allure. "Already Gone" vied with Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand" as what I fantasized about singing to any woman who spurned me. By the mid 1970s, though, I'd forsaken the Eagles' easygoing country-flavored rock for hardcore punk and for the edgier country rock of Gram Parsons. A few Eagles songs--"Your Lyin' Eyes"; "New Kid in Town"--stayed with me, along with one album, Desperado, I'd acquired while in the Army in Louisiana.
This past Sunday evening, looking for something I hadn't played in a while, I found Desperado and put it on my CD player. I tried to remember what had affected me so much about this concept album that tells the story, with the inevitable bad end, of the Doolin-Dalton Gang in the old West. Two lines stuck in my mind. One was "The towns lay out across the dusty plains/ Like graveyards full of tombstones waiting for the names", and, most poignantly for me, "It seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table/ But you only want the ones that you can't get."
On Monday, I learned of Glenn Frey's death. Here's a live performance audio of "Doolin-Dalton" from a concert at the Beacon Theater in 1974. Frey plays harmonica and guitar, and sings.
David Bowie, who died Sunday, was one of rock's protean figures. As he says in the interview shown in the video embedded in the linked BBC piece, "I'm a collector. and I've always just seemed to collect personalities; ideas...."
The clip below shows him in live performance, doing "Heroes", my favorite of his songs:
It hasn't quite made it to nine below zero here in New York yet--well, maybe on the Centigrade scale--but it's sure felt like a shock after our mostly balmy December. Still, it's an appropriate time for this blues, led and sung by the greatest of blues harmonicists, Sonny Boy Williamson. Born a sharecropper's son in Mississippi, like many great blues artists he found his way to Chicago and to Leonard Chess, for whose Chess label he recorded.
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"Chuck Berry's got to be the the greatest thing to come along." So sang the Beach Boys, as well they should have, since many of their early hits rode on Berry riffs.
Chuck brightened the 1958 Christmas season with "Run Rudolph Run". The song, which has parallels to other Berry hits "Johnny B. Goode" and "Little Queenie", was written by Johnny Marks and Marvin Brodie. Marks had, in 1949, written the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", based on a children's coloring book created for the Montgomery Ward company in 1939 by Marks's brother-in-law, Robert L. May. May's book originated the character Rudolph, whom May earlier considered naming Rollo or Reginald. I think he made the right choice.
Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday was last Saturday; he died in 1998. HeloÃsa "Helô" Pinheiro, the original "Girl from Ipanema" (photo), turned 70 last July 7. She was in her late teens when she walked by the cafe where Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes were sitting, and inspired them to write "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema"), originally titled "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By") and intended for a musical comedy being written by de Moraes. The song in its final version, in Portuguese, was introduced by Jobim to João Gilberto and Stan Getz, and during a recording session in New York they decided to do an English language version. Gilberto's wife, Astrud, could sing in English, so she was chosen as the vocalist. Her deadpan vocal style added to the song's appeal, and it became a top ten hit on the U.S. pop charts in 1965.
I was looking for something to mark the Sinatra centenary, and hit on this video of his performance with Jobim in 1967. I decided to use it because it's off the beaten track, both in terms of musical style and in his interaction with another singer. Despite my being a reformed nicotine addict, I love it that he drags on a cigarette when he's not singing.
The Byrds entered my life one day in 1965 as I was in a cafe at the University of South Florida, and from the juke box came the unforgettable sound of Roger (then called Jim) McGuinn's twelve string Rickenbacker guitar opening the band's abbreviated version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", title song of their first album. "Turn, Turn, Turn", with lyrics from Ecclesiastes and music by Pete Seeger, was the title song of their second album, released in December of 1965. The clip below has the studio album track accompanied by a montage of photos of the band and album covers. Gram Parsons joined the Byrds in 1967, and was with them for the album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a critical but not commercial success, recorded in Nashville, that took the group deep into country music. McGuinn was not entirely happy with this, and Parsons, accompanied by Chris Hillman, left the Byrds to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. My friend Dorothy Rhoads Cheshire let me know that Chris had a birthday last week, which led me into a web search in which I found this video of a lecture, with music, he gave at the Library of Congress in 2010. It's an hour and 22 minutes long, but well worth it if you are a fan, as I am, of folk, rock, or "roots Americana" music:
This rendition of "White Christmas" is on Darlene Love's Christmas album (image at left, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan). Somehow I missed her performance at the South Street Seaport, one of my favorite venues, ever since I saw the Blue Hill Troupe mount a production of HMS Pinafore on the Ambrose lightship, on a slightly foggy evening that evoked England, but I have it on Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You (1963).
This TBT goes back to four years before I was born. The heading on the YouTube clip says "first version 1942" but the song is older than that. Its origins may be traced back to an Irish song, "The Old Rose Tree", and variants were common in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. It is reported to have been one of the tunes played by Titanic's orchestra as the ship was sinking.
As for the Schnickelfritz Band, they called themselves "America's Most Unsophisticated Band" and appeared in Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers in Paris (1938), starring Rudy Vallee, whose agent discovered the band while visiting their hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota.
I was wondering what to use as a TBT this week, and the PA system at Key Food gave me the answer with this 1961 hit, which I first heard on the juke box in the "cafetorium" at Robinson High School in Tampa at the beginning of my 10th grade year. The other songs I remember from that time are "Limbo Rock" by Chubby Checker and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by the Tokens. The last is the title of an essay by the South African writer Rian Malan, which gives a history of the song, and which I'll post about sometime soon.
Allen Toussaint, who died this past Monday at 77, was a commanding, if nevertheless somewhat self-effacing, figure in New Orleans R&B from the 1960s until now. He was better known as a songwriter than as a performer, although he was a first rate musician who got his break into the business subbing for Huey "Piano" Smith at a gig in Alabama. Some of his earlier compositions, such as "Lipstick Traces" and "Fortune Teller", both recorded by Benny Spellman, were published pseudonymously under the name of his mother, Naomi Neville. "Fortune Teller" was later covered by the Rolling Stones.
A favorite of mine from his early works is Chris Kenner's 1961 hit "I Like It Like That". It has the springy rhythm and slightly understated quality of much of the best New Orleans R&B. I also like it for the line,"Let me show you where it's at", which brings to my mind the New Orleans greeting, "Where y'at?" That's the reason speakers of New Orleans dialect are called "Yats."
After Katrina did her worst to the Crescent City, Toussaint went to New York, and collaborated with Elvis Costello on a CD called "The River in Reverse". The clip above, "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?", is from that album.
The song is by Joni Mitchell, but the version I heard first, on Boston's WBCN during my first year of law school, is Tom Rush's. No offense to Joni, whose work I love, but Tom's rendition has always touched me in a profound way. Although this is a song about autumn fading into winter, I heard it first in spring. And what a spring. I had lived in Florida for years and had not experienced a northern winter since I was seven. The first snowflakes,seen through a classroom window in late October of 1967, were exciting. Having to buy a topcoat and boots was novel, and the comfort they provided welcome. But novelty soon wore off. The New England winter seemed interminable, although I was sheltered from much of it because my dorm was but a few feet of covered walkway from the student center and cafeteria, and that was connected to the classroom buildings by tunnels. I was living like a mole.
Spring finally came, and with it my discovery of WBCN, Boston's first underground rock FM station. Perhaps this song touched me because it reminded me of what I'd just endured. It made me a fan of Tom Rush, who opened his concert in my neighborhood a year ago with it.
All right, my Mets, time to get serious. Get back to Citi and show those Royals what you're made of. This 1976 hit, which I first heard on a "New Wave" anthology I got in 1977, is just the picker-upper you need. Get out there and shake it!
Update: the tonic worked tonight! Mets 9, Royals 3. Let's keep it up!
