Jerry Lee Lewis turned eighty on Tuesday. This is testimony to the wonders of medical science, or divine grace, or both. It reminds me of the joke about the old Vermont farmer who, when asked the secret to his longevity, said, "I always drink new rum and vote Democrat. One pizen neutralizes the other." (The story dates from the time when Republicans were progressives and Democrats reactionary racists. History takes strange turns.)
I saw the Killer live once. It was in the fall of 1979, and I heard that he was playing at a place on East 86th Street called the Lorelei that evening. I hurried there, thinking it was already sold out, but was able to get in. The Lorelei was a German beer and dance hall (East 86th was once the heart of a thriving German-American community) that had been bought by someone who tried to make it into a country music venue (the "urban cowboy" thing was big in '79). The place still had its original decor. Seeing and hearing Jerry Lee singing and pumping his piano under pictures of Mad King Ludwig's castles was close to a psychedelic experience.
It has little to do with Matt Harvey's (photo) pitch or inning count. It has to do with whether to go all out to win their remaining regular season games in an effort to gain home field advantage in the National League Divisional Series they will almost certainly play against the Dodgers, or to rest their best players for the playoffs.
The Mets have a winning record (2-1) against the Dodgers in Dodger Stadium this season, but only an even record (2-2) against them in Citi Field. Looking at history, though, their lifetime record at L.A. is .408; at Citi it is .496 (yes, the years since the move from Shea have been less than rewarding until now). What does this tell us? Not much, other than a home field advantage is, as they say, a home field advantage. You do get that last half inning if you need it.
So, home field advantage may be worth something. Still, there is this recent New York Times piece that argues, with historical support, that being hot going into the post-season may actually be an omen of trouble in the playoffs, and vice versa.
What to conclude? I just want them to win. Now, and then.
Winter Haven is a small city--population about 36,000--in central Florida. It's a little south and west of Orlando, east of Tampa, and west of Melbourne. It has fifty lakes within or touching its city limits, and is surrounded by citrus groves. One thing it has in common with New York City is a Central Park, with a fountain (photo above).
When I was a student at the University of South Florida I became friends with several fellow students who were from Winter Haven. I visited there on several occasions, and got to like the place very much. I even wrote a paper for one of my political science classes about its city government. (Don't ask me what my conclusions were; I've forgotten.)
From my Winter Haven friends, as I've noted before, I learned about Gram Parsons before he became famous. About two years ago, through social media, I reconnected with one of those friends, Steve Griffith. He told me that there was an effort to restore the Derry Down, the former "teen age night club" established by Gram's stepfather, initially to give Gram and his high school folk group a place to play. I then learned that the group restoring the Derry Down was presenting a "Cosmic American Music [Gram's term for his style, now called "Americana" or "Roots" or "Alt Country"] Festival," and I decided to attend.
I hadn't been to Winter Haven since 1967--48 years. In this post, I'll show some photos of scenes around town, all my photos except where otherwise noted.
One thing you're not likely to find in New York is a cattle egret standing on a car roof in a drugstore parking lot
Another sign I'm not in the North: Spanish moss hanging from a tree.
The shore of Lake Howard, the largest of Winter Haven's lakes, was a block from where I was staying. I spotted this fly fisherman working along its shore. He's standing on a small boat that's hidden by the reeds.
This handsome building is at the corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street NW. Winter Haven is laid out with lettered avenues going east to west and numbered streets going north to south, divided into NE, NW, SE, and SW quadrants; because this pattern is frequently interrupted by lakes, some circumscribed by drives bearing their names, e.g. "Lake Howard Drive," I once described a map of Winter Haven as a Cartesian grid superimposed on a piece of Swiss cheese. The building is called "Time Square," and was given that name by my friend Steve, who, inspired by the clock on its northwest corner, won a contest to name it when he was eleven or so. I don't recall what prize he won. Photo: LoopNet.com
As a bibliophile, I believe you can tell a lot about a city by the quality of its library. The Kathryn L. Smith Memorial Library, done in the Spanish colonial style popular in Florida, looks impressive and capacious. I wish I'd had time to explore inside.
Lily pads near the shore of Lake May.
Another solitary egret perched by the lake shore.
I'll be doing another post soon about the Cosmic American Music Festival and some of the groups and musicians I saw, heard, and met there.
Leonard Cohen, the Bard of Montreal, turned 81 this week. He is a poet, songwriter, singer, and novelist (Beautiful Losers). I first knew of him from listening to Judy Collins sing his "Suzanne" on WBCN in Boston during my law school years. It almost made me want to be Canadian.
The clip above shows him doing one of his most popular songs, "Bird on a Wire," and a favorite of mine, live in concert in London.
While he'll always, and rightly, mostly be remembered as a Yankee. the photo shows him as I like to remember him, as one of my beloved Mets. He's shown as a first base coach in 1969, the year the formerly lowly Mets went all the way. In 1965, along with coaching, he had donned catcher's regalia and called a few games for them. He became their manager after Gil Hodges' death in 1972, and led them to a National League pennant in 1973. Midway that season, the Mets were in last pace in their division. A pundit asked Berra if the season was over for them. He replied with what has perhaps become the best known of his many memorable quotations: "It ain't over till it's over."
I'm off to the Cosmic American Music Festival in Winter Haven, Florida this weekend. Winter Haven was the home town of the late Gram Parsons who, in my estimation, was one of the most brilliant, and unfortunately one of the most troubled and wasted, pop musicians of the past century.
Gram dropped out of Harvard to form the International Submarine Band, a group that blended country, blues, and rock influences, a style he called "Cosmic American Music," that can be heard today as "Americana" or "alt/country." After one album, Safe At Home, he left to join the Byrds, one of the best American groups of the mid to late Sixties. He was with them for one great album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, but left after he and Roger McGuinn disagreed about the band's direction. Chris Hillman, one of the original Byrds, left with him to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. After two critically praised albums, he was asked to leave that group because of his increasing alcoholism and drug use.
GP, recorded in 1972, when Gram had developed a close friendship with Keith Richards, was his first solo album. In it, he introduced the voice of a previously little known singer, Emmylou Harris. In the clip above, from that album, he and Emmylou do the country classic of the "cheatin' song" genre, written by Joyce Allsup, "We'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning."
Yes, it's that month of cooling temperatures. We had a couple of days this week that saw thermometers registering in the low 90s, but relief is said to be on the way, after some rain we could use. It's also, for me and I suspect for many, a time of reflection, especially as we grow older and see the progress of the year reflecting our own progress into autumn, with winter to follow.
"September Song" was written by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, for an unsuccessful 1938 Broadway show, Knickerbocker Holiday. It was first recorded by the show's star, Walter Huston. Despite the show's failure, the song went on to become a standard. Bing Crosby recorded it twice, and Frank Sinatra three times. The third was the lucky one; it was on his 1965 album September of My Years, recorded when he was fifty. The album went to number five on the Billboard pop album chart. The song was later covered by, among others, James Brown, Lou Reed, and Willie Nelson.
Just over a year ago, inspired by Moira Redmond's Clothes in Books, I posted "Clothes in pop music, part 1, 1955-63". Since my last post went to 1963, why am I calling this one, which goes into 1972, "the Sixties"? I don't believe "the Sixties" as we Americans understand the term in either cultural or political senses coincides with the decade beginning 12:00 a.m 1960 and ending 11:59 p.m. 1969. Some people, I think, would begin the Sixties with the election of John F. Kennedy (November 8, 1960), others with his assassination (November 22, 1963). Some other arguable starting points are Dwight D. Eisenhower's valedictory "Military-Industrial Complex" speech (January 17, 1961), The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (July 2, 1964) the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 2, 1964), or--from a musical perspective--the first arrival of the Beatles in America (February 7, 1964). I've decided to go with the date of the assassination. While the election of JFK heralded a change, his assassination was an event that tore the fabric of the culture; one that, I think, would not be rivaled again until the Watergate scandal and resignation of Richard Nixon. As you can see above, several other transformative events came shortly afterward, in 1964.
I'm not sure where to mark the beginning of the Sixties from a fashion perspective. Certainly Jackie Kennedy had an influence on women's couture, one aspect of which is mentioned in one of the songs below. For me, the most noticeable change came in the later Sixties, in the aftermath of the British Invasion, when Mod fashion began to make inroads here. What I remember are bright floral and paisley prints, wider lapels on men's jackets, and wider ties. Thanks to the Beach Boys, there was also a surfing influence, with baggies, Henley collared shirts, and huarache sandals.
The other question is: When did the Sixties end? My answer is August 9, 1974, the date Richard Nixon resigned. Others, perhaps less politically and more musically oriented than me (though I think of myself as very musically oriented) might argue for the time the Beatles broke up, an agonizing, slow motion affair that may best be dated to April of 1970, when Paul McCartney announced he was leaving. Coincidentally, it was in the spring of 1970 that I experienced what I consider my quintessential Sixties moment. I was walking across the Cambridge, Massachusetts common and encountered five or six girls, about eight or nine years old, playing ring-around-the-rosie. What they were singing, though, was "Christ, you know it ain't easy/ You know how hard it can be/ The way things are going/ They're gonna CRUCIFY [all fall down] me."
Anyway, on to the songs:
In 1964 Frankie Valli and the other Jersey Boys had a number one hit on the Billboard pop chart with "Rag Doll." According to the song's Wiki it was written by group member Bob Gaudio, who "was inspired by a dirty-faced girl who cleaned the windshield of his automobile for change." When Gaudio reached into his wallet for a dollar (a very generous tip in those days), he found he had nothing but twenties (evidently the singer-songwriter thing was working out well), and gave her one, to her amazement. "I'd change her sad rags into glad rags if I could" is for me one of the more memorable lines from the early, pre-British Invasion Sixties.
Also in 1964, bluesman Tommy Tucker released "Hi-Heel Sneakers," which he wrote under his birth name Robert Higginbotham, misspelled "Higgenbotham" on the record label. The song would be covered many times, including by the Beatles and the Stones. Yes, footwear counts.
"Baby's in Black" was recorded in 1964, but released in 1965 as part of the album Beatles for Sale, which was released in the U.S. as Beatles 65. I've long been unsure if the song was about a woman mourning a deceased lover, or dressing in black to signal to an ex that she's available again. It's the former.
As I recall, Jackie Kennedy popularized the pillbox hat. Bob Dylan had some fun with it in 1966, on this track from his album Blonde on Blonde.
1966 was a fertile year for songs about millinery and clothes. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels had a major hit with the pedal-to-the-metal rocker "Devil with a Blue Dress On."
Footwear joins the fray in '66 with Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walking." It was also a good year for tough woman songs (this and the one before).
Tough guy songs, too. According to the song's Wiki the Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was written by Ray Davies after he had gotten into a "terrible brawl" with a fashion designer (and his girlfriend!) following a discussion in which Davies derided the designer's obsession with style and in which
I was just saying you don't have to be anything; you decide what you want to be and you just walk down the street and if you're good the world will change as you walk past. I just wanted it to be the individual who created his own fashion.
A very, I would say, Sixties sort of statement.
Does eyewear count? I say, "Yes!" When I first heard "Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)" on Boston's WRKO in 1968, the DJ called the group "John Fred and his Louisiana Playboys." Jello Biafra covers the song on his recently released album of New Orleans R&B, Walk on Jindal's Splinters.
This achingly sweet, autobiographical song topped the country chart in 1971. According to the song's Wiki, Parton wrote it in 1969 while on tour, riding in Porter Wagoner's bus. Wagoner was host of a weekly TV country music show that was the launching pad for Parton's career. A college roommate told me he had gone to a Grand Old Opry road show in Orlando and heard the following during Bobby Bare's set:
BARE: Y'all watch Porter Wagoner?
AUDIENCE: [Lots of cheering, clapping and whistling.]
BARE: Yeah, I like him, too. But you know who his sponsor is?
AUDIENCE: [Lots of chuckling. Wagoner's sponsor was a patent laxative called Black Draught.]
BARE: Yeah, well, I think I could do something like that. It'd go like this: Folks, this is the Bobby Bare Show, brought to you by Ex-Lax. Now we're gonna have some good old country pickin' and singin' and some old-time fiddlin', but first a word from our sponsor. Folks, you ever have one of those nasty old coughs, the kind that just hangs on and hangs on? Next time you get one of those coughs, take Ex-Lax. It won't cure your cough, but it'll make you too SCARED to cough.
AUDIENCE: [Laughter and groans.]
I'll close with a song by the Hollies, made long after Graham Nash left the group to join CSN&Y. The singer is Allan Clarke; unlike other Hollies songs there are no backing vocals because Clarke intended it for a solo album. It charted at number two in the U.S. in September of 1972, shortly before Richard Nixon was elected to his second term. This was followed by the revelation of the Watergate break-in and by the ensuing efforts to cover it up that would lead to Nixon's resignation two years later.
In my previous post I promised that my next one would cover the time from 1963 to the present. I'll confess to having been unable to think of any pop songs after 1972 that are about or refer strongly to clothes. I suspect that this is because I haven't followed "pop" as much as I used to, and "pop" has fissioned into so many branches--disco, metal, punk, rap, reggae, indie, etc.--all of which I've followed to some extent, but none as thoroughly as the pre-seventies "top forty." If anyone can think of any songs from after 1972, or any from the period (1964-1972) covered in this post, that should be noted, please let me know.
The Bourne Bridge, our entryway to the Cape. There are two other bridges that cross the Cape Cod Canal onto the Cape proper. To the north is the Sagamore Bridge, and to the south is a railroad bridge with a lift span that stays up to let ships pass and is only lowered when a train needs to cross. Rail passenger service to the Cape was restored recently after many years' absence.
Skaket Beach, on the Cape Cod Bay side of the Town of Orleans, at high tide.
Skaket Beach at low tide. Note how far out on the sandbars people go.
This rabbit was often seen near our friends' driveway.
Provincetown harbor.
Looking back at Provincetown from the MacMillan Pier. The building in the background is the Provincetown Public Library.
On the way back from Provincetown, we made our second visit to Truro Vineyards; a photo of their vineyard is above (compare to photos taken in early June of 2013 in the post linked above). I bought a bottle of their estate grown cabernet franc and one of their estate grown chardonnay. I'll be tasting both and reporting about them here; stay tuned.
Here's a tiger swallowtail butterfly getting nectar from a butterfly bush in our friends' backyard.
For Labor Day, in celebration of my newly found Irish heritage, I'm posting a song by Patrick Street, with a vocal by Andy Irvine, about Michael Davitt, who organized the Irish tenant farmers in the late nineteenth century.
I missed it. Last Sunday, August 30, was the tenth anniversary of the birth of Self-Absorbed Boomer. Much has gone down, and much has changed, since I first posted on August 30, 2005. If you read the linked post, you'll see references to the "Fray." It was an on-line discussion board appended to Slate, first Microsoft's then WaPo's on-line only magazine. The Fray no longer exists, though Slate still does. It was because of a suggestion made on the Fray that we all start blogs that I started mine. Many Fraysters have remained my friends; some only on-line while others also in the flesh, and some are my regular readers.
Over the years I've also gathered some readers through my work on the Brooklyn Heights Blog and through Facebook. Early on, I was posting more frequently, but most of my posts were quite short. Now, I'm putting the short stuff on Facebook, although I also put links to all my S-A B posts there, too. Work on BHB has also cut into the time I could devote to S-A B.
I hope I can keep this going for another decade (if I last that long; both of my parents made it into their nineties, so I may have genetics on my side), and that you'll continue to enjoy it. Thanks to you, my readers.
Not only is this week's TBT by the same artist--but what an artist!--as last week's, but it's the same song. Well, at least, the same tune. This is the original; written by Berry, it was recorded and released in 1957, charted at number five on Billboard and number one on the R&B chart. It's been covered many times since, by artists and groups as diverse as Eddie Cochran, the Beach Boys, AC/DC, The Simpsons (with guest vocal by Buster Poindexter and lead guitar by Joe Walsh), the Iron City Houserockers, and Ann Rabson.
It's been almost exactly 48 years since I sat in Hazen's sandwich shop on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, heard "Brown Eyed Girl" on the jukebox, and wondered, "Who is that?"
The following year, 1968, we were both in Cambridge, and you were gigging in some of the local venues. I was busy being a law student, so didn't get to hear you accompanying yourself on acoustic guitar, along with Tom Keilbania on upright bass and John Payne on flute. Later that year you went to New York to cut your first album for Warner, Astral Weeks, with a group of jazz musicians you'd never met before, though you manged to get Payne on to play flute. Below is a clip of the title track:
When I first heard the album I didn't like it. It was too subtle, too restrained, too "jazzy." As my tastes expanded with age and experience, I came to like it very much.
Tomorrow, August 31, 2015 you'll be seventy. I'll reach that milestone next March. As one near septuagenarian to another, I wish you many more years and many more songs.
I'll be riding along in my (rental) automobile soon, so this by, in my opinion, the greatest rocker of all, was on my mind, despite my having a particular place to go. The clip below gives you the music, along with a great photo montage of vintage muscle cars.
The song charted in late 1964, just as I was starting college. Safety belts were a new thing then.
There's a story, possibly spurious, that Winston Churchill was handed a draft of something he'd written; on it, an editor had written in the margin that he should change a sentence so that it didn't end with a preposition. Churchill's response, written below the marginal note, was, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."
I've never been keen on the rule that one should never end a sentence with a preposition. It's something I'm willing to put up with. Similarly, I'm no fan of the rule against splitting infinitives. "To boldly go" is certainly the best known violation of that rule, and it sounds, and reads, so much better than "To go boldly," My guiding rule on syntax is, if its meaning is clear and it isn't ugly, it's okay.
In general, I have no objection to neologisms, unless they're ugly or replace something that doesn't need replacing. This extends to making verbs out of nouns, including, as I can never resist adding, the verb "to verb." My wife, who is an archivist, hates to see "archive" used as a verb. She's fighting a losing battle; one that, in my opinion, isn't worth fighting. Yes, "archive" is a noun meaning a repository of historically significant materials, but to use "archive" as a verb meaning to add something to an archive (n.) doesn't create any confusion. Also, "I archived X" is shorter than "I added X to the archive." The fact that "archive" is now a button on some software programs probably means the battle is over.
There's one exception to my non-objection to the verbing of nouns. That's the recently popular use of "gift" as a verb, replacing the already available and good "give." I made my argument here, then walked it back a bit, more in the sense of accepting the inevitable than changing my mind.
One thing I won't back down from is my struggle against apostrophe misuse. Using an apostrophe in a plural noun, as in "The Johnson's are coming to dinner," or failing to use one in a possessive noun, as in "That is Jims car," isn't creative or cute, it's just stupid. I've stated my case in full here.
I also get on my high horse about confusion of homonyms, such as rein and reign and throws and throes. My particular peeve now is a confusion of near-homonyms I see frequently on social media, the use of loose for lose.
"So Rare" was written in 1937 and recorded and released that year by two big bands, Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. There were many subsequent releases, including one by Marian McPartland and George Shearing in 1953. Jimmy Dorsey recorded it in November of 1956, and it rose to number two on the Billboard pop chart in 1957. It has been called the last hit of the big band era, although the song's Wikipedia entry describes Dorsey's version as having "a decidedly rhythm and blues feel unlike the earlier versions."
A week ago PortSide New York, headed by my friend Carolina Salguera, played host to a weekend long festival aboard their historic coastal tanker Mary A. Whalen. I went on Saturday afternoon, when a folk music sing-along was scheduled.
Off in the harbor a fireboat was making a display of spray.
Looking aft, I saw cranes of the Red Hook Container Port and the skyline of lower Manhattan.
We sang some folk music chestnuts like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and labor songs like "Solidarity Forever" and "Union Maid." At my suggestion we did a couple of sea shanteys, "New York Girls," as performed below by Steeleye Span, with assistance from Peter Sellars on ukulele and verbal commentary,
and "Haul Away Joe," which I'd learned first from the Kingston Trio, then from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.
Heather and Jerry led us in a version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with which I was not familiar:
As I left the party, I took this photo of Mary A. Whalen's wheelhouse and funnel against a sunset sky:
Last week, as a nod to my friends in Florida, I TBT'd Creedence's "Who'll Stop the Rain?" This may have started a "rain" meme going in my head; that and the fact that, here in New York, we've been having a dryer than normal summer, and the leaves on the ginkgo trees outside our windows are fringed in brown. Anyway, this soulful hit from the spring of 1968 started playing on the tape loop of my mind. So, as the Pythons were wont to say: "And now, for something completely different...."
Yesterday evening I took a walk down to Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 5. As I walked out onto the pier, the sun had already set, but its rays were still reflected from clouds to the west.
As I reached the end of the pier and looked south, I saw the tug Miriam Moran "on the hip" of a barge loaded with cargo containers, taking them from the Red Hook container port; their probable destination being a railhead in New Jersey. You can find another photo of Miriam, and a link to an explanation of "on the hip," in this post.
The small container ship Nefeli was docked further down at Red Hook. Most ships using this facility bring containers loaded with bananas from Central and South America.
Looking to the west, I saw my old friend the self-unloading bulk carrier Alice Oldendorff coming through the channel between Governors Island and lower Manhattan, heading for her dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Like her sister Sophie Oldendorff, seen in this post, she will deliver a load of Canadian crushed stone.
The attractive motor launch Kingston was moored at the north side of the pier, waiting for the next day's work.
This is for my friends in Tampa, my old home town, although I'm sure you've heard it many times on local radio over the past few days. The Wikipedia entry for the song corrects what had been for me a mondegreen. The second verse begins, "I went down Virginia, seeking shelter from the storm." This made me hear subsequent lines as "Bobby plans a New Deal, wrapped in golden chains." "Bobby" seemed logical, as Robert Kennedy went to the University of Virginia Law School. Now I know it's "Five Year Plans and New Deals," implying what seems to me, though perhaps not to my more radical friends on both the left and right, an unfortunate parallel between FDR's liberalism and Stalin's totalitarianism.
At least my mondegreen wasn't as bad as someone's who heard "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as "The girl with colitis goes by." I suppose a helpful thing to say to her would be another mondegreen, this one from Creedence's "Bad Moon Rising": "There's a bathroom on the right."
It was ninety degrees in the shade yesterday, so this may seem an obvious choice. Maybe too obvious. Still, I like the song. It's worn well.
In the photo at left the band are (from bottom to top): John Sebastian, Zal Yanovsky, Joe Butler, and Steve Boone. Yanovsky left the band in 1967 and Sebastian in '68, both to pursue solo careers. Yanovsky died in 2002. The group disbanded in 1969, but in 1991 Boone and Butler, along with Jerry Yester, who had replaced Yanovsky in '67, re-formed the band. The Lovin' Spoonful continue today with Boone, Butler, Yester, Mike Arturi, and Phil Smith.
Note: when I first posted this, I misidentified the order of the band members in the photo, and misspelled "Yanovsky." My friend and rock maven extraordinaireMichael Simmons set me straight, and I've corrected the post accordingly.
When my wife said Steeleye Span were to appear at B.B. King's I was surprised, thinking the group, an old favorite of mine, had broken up years ago. They did break up in 1978, when lead singer Maddy Prior wanted to pursue a solo career. Nevertheless, Maddy later reconstituted the band, of which she is now the only original member. In the photo above the band members are (from left to right): guitarist and vocalist Julian Littman; fiddler and vocalist Jessie May Smart; Maddy Prior; bassist Nils JerusalemP, who recently joined the band in Seattle as a replacement for Maddy's son, Alex Kemp, who, according to Maddy, had some "paperwork problems" entering the U.S.; and drummer Liam Genockey.
The band opened with "Blackleg Miner," a song about a nineteenth century coal miners' strike. A "blackleg" was a strikebreaker, or scab. The clip above, made some years ago, shows an earlier lineup of musicians. Maddy carries the vocal by herself. At the performance last week, the other band members joined in harmony. Maddy, who will celebrate her 68th birthday on August 14, has a voice that is every bit as strong and in command of its full range as when she was younger, but the harmony vocals gave this song more of the "oomph" it needs.
Their next song came from my favorite of their albums, Commoners Crown. "Long Lankin" is a typical old English ballad, telling of betrayal, child murder, hanging, and burning at the stake. Some of Steeleye Span's songs, lovely as they are to hear, have very dark lyrics. This is because Medieval England, from which place and time these songs originated, was, for many, a place and time where life, to borrow the words of the seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, could be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The clip above is audio only; it starts with an image of the album cover, then goes to solid black. Dark indeed.
"King Henry" starts darkly: the King finds himself in a haunted house in the company of a horrific female ghoul who, in the words of Julian Littman, who introduced the song and took the lead vocal, forces him to "kill his household pets," which she devours, then to join her in bed. It ends on a bright note, though; he wakes up the following morning to find next to him the loveliest woman he's ever seen. It's good to be the King.
The band ended the concert (except for a lovely a cappella encore, the title of which I can't remember) with "Thomas the Rhymer." This song has a theme common to many of its vintage: a man, or sometimes a woman, is captured by an elf or fairy queen or king, goes through some sort of ordeal, and returns changed in some way. In the case of Thomas, it was supposed to be having the gift of prophecy. Another song, "Tam Lin", as done by another great English folk rock group, Fairport Convention, tells a tale of a man saved from the ordeal by the intervention of his lady love.
I didn't know what to expect of this concert, and was prepared to be disappointed. I was very pleasantly surprised. Maddy Prior is still in top form, and the new band members performed admirably. Special mention goes to Jessie May Smart, whose fiddle playing was extraordinary, and to Nils JerusalemP, who obviously has learned the band's repertoire quickly and adeptly.
California in the 1960s had the Beach Boys; the East Coast, from Virginia down through the Carolinas and Georgia, had Beach Music. The Tams, from Atlanta, along with Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, exemplified this easy rolling, party friendly style of rhythm and blues. Two versions of the Tams survive today.
Perhaps the best remembered of their hits is "What Kind Of Fool Do You Think I Am?" Hear it below:
I was born in Evanston, Illinois on February 17, 1937. My mother, Karla Seifer Grossinger, had, in her seventh month, been hospitalized for observation. The pregnancy, her first, was not going well. My father, Max, had been admitted to a separate wing ten days earlier with a second heart attack. She overheard two nurses speaking outside her door. "Isn't it a shame that Mr. Grossinger is dying." My mother told me this story when I was six years old; it was one of the rare times she ever mentioned my father. She begged the nurses to let her see him but was warned she might lose the baby if she left her bed. Two minutes later they picked her up from the floor. My heartbeat was undetectable, and a caesarean section was performed, ostensibly to bring out a dead fetus.
From this inauspicious beginning came a woman who would, over the course of her life, become friends with Jackie Robinson and Betty Friedan, and have meaningful encounters with John F. Kennedy, Hugh Hefner, Ayn Rand (who played a joke on her), and Johnny Carson, among others. Details are in her book; my review is here.
This morning I was greatly saddened to learn of her death on Sunday, July 19, at the age of 78. I wish I had been given more time to spend with her; not just to hear her stories of the good (and not so good) and great she had known, but to appreciate her own magnificence,
Addendum: my fellow Lion's Head alum Maureen O'Brien has these words:
RIP Tania Grossinger. You were amazing. I will always remember your infectious smile, laugh, sensitivity, smarts, and heart. Thank you so much for being my friend, Village neighbor, Lion's Head pal and non-stop cheerleader. You and your wonderful books will never be forgotten. You were one of the greats. xoxomo
