"In September 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, in a speech in Las Vegas, warned that drug use was threatening 'to sap our national strength'..."

"... and called out a number of pop songs, including the Beatles’ 'With a Little Help From My Friends' and the Byrds’ 'Eight Miles High,' as 'latent drug culture propaganda.' Within a year, under the Nixon administration, the Federal Communications Commission warned broadcasters about playing songs with lyrics that might promote drug use. As a result, 'One Toke Over the Line' was banned by radio stations in Buffalo, Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Brewer & Shipley, Mr. Brewer said, came to embrace the crackdown as 'a badge of honor.'"

From "Michael Brewer, Whose 'One Toke' Was a Big Hit, Is Dead at 80/The duo Brewer & Shipley reached the Top 10 in 1970 with 'One Toke Over the Line,' a ditty about marijuana that ran afoul of Nixon-era censors" (NYT).

Brewer lived to be 80 and that was half a century after he expressed this conception of how he wanted to die: "My last wish will be just one thing/Be smilin' when I die/I wanna be one toke over the line, sweet Jesus/One toke over the line..."

The singer was "sitting downtown in a railway station" and "just waitin' for the train that goes home, sweet Mary." 

Even if the song originated from an exclamation about smoking marijuana, it seems that the substance of the song is religious. The metaphor of the train is seen in other songs, such as "People Get Ready (There's a train a-coming....") and "This Train (Is Bound for Glory)."

I wouldn't brush off "One Toke Over the Line" as a "ditty."

And by the way, screw Agnew. Back in 1970, young people easily opposed censorship. Who would have thought that in 50 years, the tables would be turned and the young would embrace it?

"[Dylan] and Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before."

"Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like 'Uh Uh Uh' — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff? He kept holding up Curtis Mayfield songs as a model, like 'People Get Ready'... ... Robertson didn’t know... that that song was in a way the grandchild of one of Dylan’s own songs... [It] was inspired by 'A Change is Gonna Come,' which was in turn inspired by 'Blowin’ in the Wind' — but nonetheless Dylan thought that Robertson had a point. He was getting increasingly disenchanted with the counterculture which he was supposedly the figurehead for, and with psychedelic music. But also, he was aware that you could do a lot even with simple language... [b]ecause the folk tradition he came from had a very different attitude to language than either the Beat poets he’d been recently imitating or the R&B songwriters that the Hawks [i.e., The Band] had been listening to...."

Episode 167 of Andrew Hickey's "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" is about "The Weight" by The Band. (It's only by chance that this song came up in the week when Robbie Robertson died.)

That podcast I keep recommending.

As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Andrew Hickey's podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs." I discovered it around the first of this month. (I forget why, maybe Spotify pushed it.) And I've truly binged on it, getting all the way through the 133 episodes that are currently available. 

There are bonus episodes, most of which are available only to those who subscribe on Patreon, and I've done that, the first and only time I've subscribed to an individual on social media. I have some subscriptions, but only to things that begin with "New York": The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. Wait there's one more: The Times (London). I have a couple subscriptions that were gifts: The Washington Post, Reason. But basically, I'm a subscriber to big media, not to social media. This one thing — "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — is my exception. 

I've recommended the podcast a few times. Click the "Andrew Hickey" tag to read all the old posts. I love that there's a published transcript, making it super-bloggable. I have to resist over-blogging it, because there are so many interesting things in every episode.

But let me blog 2 things that stood out to me over the 133 episodes I've consumed. Maybe it's evidence of something wrong with me, but I am drawn to stories of the impoverished childhood of a person who goes on to be very successful. So here are 2:

"The traditional voyeuristic peephole in film suggests the person being watched is under threat. The peephole makes the person looking through the peephole into the vulnerable one."

Aaid Catherine Zimmer, author of 'Surveillance Cinema,' quoted in "The Policing of the American Porch/Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages" (in the Style section of NYT).

Note that Amazon owns Ring, and people who buy and install these devices are facilitating Amazon's business, which is hurt by the theft of packages left outside customers' houses. Amazon ought to give us the devices free and given an Amazon Prime discount to people who keep them up and running.

It's interesting to see how we balance security and privacy as we accept these devices. Imagine if the government simply required us to accept the installation of the devices and imposed its app on all cell phones. What if the city added $1,000 a year to the property tax on any home that did not maintain a Ring-type surveillance doorbell? Of course, we would scream.

But here we are accepting the thing, because it seems cool, and it's low-priced. (If you want one, please buy it here, so that I get a percentage, since I am an "Amazon Associate" and have — voluntarily!! — linked my fortunes to Amazon.) Since the device is voluntary, those who accept it onto their property feel they are gaining security.

If you, the person inside the house, are peeping out, then, as the film professor says, you have the sense that whoever approaches your house is "the vulnerable one."  The conventions of cinematography say, you are in control, you have the power. That's important... at least some of the time.

Or maybe all of the time if the world has already changed to the point where children don't come up to doors to ask if a child who lives there can come out to play and neighbors stop by to chat.

ADDED: The second part of the quote in the post title is confusing: "The peephole makes the person looking through the peephole into the vulnerable one." I assume Zimmer didn't mean to say 2 different things, and that "the person looking through the peephole" means the person outside of the house who is being watched from inside the house. But taken literally, it seems more like the one who is looking out through the peephole — the homeowner who wanted to do surveillance — has become vulnerable. We'd need some more clever verbiage to sketch out that theory.

The hunter becomes the prey... but how? Did Zimmer intend to call up the old hunter/hunted switcheroo?

That trope has roots as far back as Greek Mythology, where a quite literal hunter, Actaeon, is transformed into a deer by Artemis and eventually torn apart by his own dogs.

The Hunter of Monsters in general lives by this trope in a supernatural context, since monsters, in general, are often portrayed as predators of human beings, and human beings tend not to like being prey....

Zimmer is a film scholar, and this trope appears in many movies — "M... Dr. Mabuse... North by Northwest... To Catch a Thief..." — and we all know the cartoons with the hunter-becomes-the-hunted plot. Here's the classic:



IN THE COMMENTS: Roger Sweeny said:

I think she means that if you are looking through the peephole worrying that someone may be trying to do you wrong, you are feeling vulnerable. You are worrying that something bad could happen to you, caused by the person on the other side of the peephole.

I found that hard to coordinate with the first sentence: "The traditional voyeuristic peephole in film suggests the person being watched is under threat." But Zimmer did say "traditional," so it may be that in the cinematic tradition — such as "Psycho" — the peephole is in a secretive pace, used for spying on someone who thinks no one's watching and gets naked, but with the Ring, the thing is out and proud and the person approaching is outside and expecting to be seen. The person who is in private, inside the house is not seen via the peephole, but that person's sense of vulnerability is manifested by the device. The obvious Ring device isn't a way to sneak a look at someone but to let them know in advance that you're suspicious of them.

For a complete reversal of the peephole, see the "Reverse Peephole" episode of "Seinfeld":



"Newman and I are reversing the peepholes on our door. So you can see in..."/"To prevent an ambush"/"But then anyone can just look in and see you"/"Our policy is, we're comfortable with our bodies. You know, if someone wants to help themselves to an eyeful, well, we say, 'Enjoy the show.'"

AND: Don't forget the great 60s slogan, "Power to the Peephole!"

"I used to love to watch her dance the Grizzly Bear/I guess she's gone to Frisco, to dance it there..."

There really is a dance called the Grizzly Bear, which I didn't know until yesterday, though I've heard the lyric quoted in the post title hundreds of times. "Grizzly Bear" by The Youngbloods was in the stack of singles next to my record player in the 1960s. I happened to play this video of it:



Before they play the song, Dick Clark interviews Jesse Colin Young about it, and he says: "I'm a ragtime freak, and... this is about a dance in the 1890s called the Grizzly Bear where people used to hug each other and jump." Dick Clark is amazed: "An actual dance?" Yes, there was "a club in San Francisco called The Grizzly Bear."

Here's an NPR article from 2015, "Dirty Dancing In The Early 1900s":

[T]he Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and other so-called "animal dances" of the early 1900s... shocked America and had polite society crying shame, shame, shame....

"Wilson Banned Ball Fearing Turkey Trot," was the New York Times headline on Jan. 13, 1913. According to the report, the Inaugural Committee was told that the president-elect wanted to cancel the usual Inaugural Ball because he "feared there would be indulgence in the turkey trot, the bunny hug and other ragtime dances and thus provoke what might amount to a National scandal."... Later in the month, Wilson characterized such reports as "ridiculous," but the ball was canceled....

[According to the] 1924 book The Social Dance... "The 'Boll Weevil Wiggle' and the 'Texas Tommy Wiggle' are danced in close personal contact intended to arouse sex feeling. The 'Grizzly Bear' encourages the closest and most violent physical contact for the same purpose... The 'Turkey Trot, 'Fox Trot,' 'Horse Trot, 'Fish Walk,' 'Dog Walk,' 'Tiger Dance,' and the 'Buzzard Lope,' are all imitative of the lower animals in their sex life, sex desire, sex excitement and sex satisfaction; and these things are in the minds of the dancers who understand the meaning of the animal dances."

Oh, don't just about all dances represent sex?  Sex isn't a special "lower animals" activity. But it made me wonder whether there were "animal" dances in the 1960s when I was listening to "Grizzly Bear." Answer: Yes. There was The Monkey, demonstrated by the great Smokey Robinson (and possibly requiring censorship in the modern age):



And here's "Monkey Time" — as performed by Major Lance on "Shindig" (in perhaps 1964). Keep your eye on the dancers way in the background. I found this disturbing enough to begin to question whether it was intentionally racist at the time, but I see the song was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, so that's the end of the inquiry for me.

Anyway, the subject of this post is dances named after animals, and the possible objections to them.

"If I walked into Congress wearing a sack, they would laugh & take a picture of my backside."

"If I walk in with my best sale-rack clothes, they laugh & take a picture of my backside. Dark hates light — that’s why you tune it out. Shine bright & keep it pushing."

Tweeted Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. I'm reading the tweet in "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore clothing, a journalist tweeted a photo, and the Internet pounced" which is in The Washington Post, where the slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness," which seems to be paraphrasable as "Dark hates light." I think Ocasio-Cortez responded quite nicely. I even like "Shine bright & keep it pushing" — which made me, an old Boomer, think of 2 of my all-time favorites, John Lennon and Curtis Mayfield ...



Well, we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun...



Keep on pushing... I can't stop now, move up a little higher, some way, somehow...