Happy Birthday, America.

From There I Ruined It:

"That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with 'Tommy.'"

"When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with 'The Magic Flute.'... That’s why I find it more profitable to think about 'Tommy' not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala. That person would of course be [Pete] Townshend, who... recently told The Times that 'Tommy' is probably 'a memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.'... [H]is abuse, he said, was at the hands of his 'awful' grandmother, not his 'neglectful and careless' parents.... 'Sickness will surely take the mind/Where minds can’t usually go'....  [Townshend's] avatar... finds that 'freedom lies in normality.' This is the opposite of rock’s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem 'Listening to You' is not a crowd of admirers but his mother. [The new Broadway] production does not traffic in such subtleties.... You will be overwhelmed.... [W]hen everything’s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special."

Writes Jesse Green, in "'Tommy' Goes Full Tilt in a Relentless Broadway Revival/Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?" (NYT).

Green makes his points really well. I'm just going to pick one nit — with the headline. In pinball, you don't "go full tilt." "Tilt" ends the game. The "tilt" in "go full tilt" is the tilting in jousting. You're on a horse, aiming a lance, riding quickly toward another horseman with a lance. That's the concrete thing in the dying metaphor. You may remember Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie. And I concede that there was a pinball video game in the 90s called Full Tilt! Pinball. That's got nothing to do with Tommy, which is not about video games. 

But then the show, as Green tells it, is out of whack and, in overdoing everything, misses the chance to tell a story consistent with Townshend's recent revelations.

"Where in 1966 and 67 the general feeling had been that the counterculture was moving towards some post-racial utopia where Black and white people alike..."

"... could play psychedelic soul-infused blues music, now [after the King assassination] a Black man like Jimi Hendrix playing music for white audiences was derided by other Black people in terms I won’t repeat, while white singers like Joplin who were influenced by Black musicians were thought of as not far from minstrelsy. Joplin hadn’t noticed this change...."

From a new episode of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" —  "Episode 169: 'Piece of My Heart' by Big Brother and the Holding Company."

Lots of great stuff in that episode, including how intelligent Janis Joplin was and how much her singing was based on imitation:

"It has often been suggested that as [Bob] Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak..."

"... from [Bob] Neuwirth. 'The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,' Bob Spitz wrote in 'Dylan: A Biography' (1989). 'So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.' Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame. 'Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,' he wrote, 'a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.' Mr. Dylan, in his book 'Chronicles: Volume One' (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth: 'Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.'"

From "Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82/He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin" (NYT). 

Neuwirth, we're told, taught Janis Joplin the Kris Kristofferson song "Me & Bobby McGee," and he co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with her. 

ADDED: Spitz's use of the words "hipster shuck and jive" undercuts the argument that Neuwirth created this style of personal presentation. This obituary shows the New York Times carrying on the long tradition of making black people invisible.

From the Wikipedia article "Shuckin' and jivin'":

Shuckin' and jivin' (or shucking and jiving) is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment.... 

According to the linguist Barbara Ann Kipfer, the origins of the phrase may be traced to when "black slaves sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted toward white people."... 

In 2008, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said of the Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who was running against Hillary Clinton, the candidate Cuomo supported: "You can't shuck and jive at a press conference." Cuomo received criticism from some for his use of the phrase. Roland Martin of CNN said that "'Shucking and jiving' have long been words used as a negative assessment of African Americans, along the lines of a 'foot-shufflin' Negro.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Hipster (1940s subculture)": 

In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive"... 

In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk".... Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed....

In The Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm... described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders"....

The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".

50 years ago, this evening, Janis Joplin died.

My son John has posted a tribute on his blog. He's put up some music videos. I just want to put this up — something I saw at the time and have always remembered — Janis Joplin talking to Dick Cavett about attending her high school reunion. It's heartbreaking:

"He saw it out in Hollywood at a dreadful screening. Afterward, he said: 'We’ll have another screening and I’ll write down all of the things we have to change.'"

"Of course, that made me a little gloomy. The next night, we assembled again and he sat in the front with this yellow pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said: 'That’s it.'"

"He" is Bob Dylan, the subject of the documentary film "Don't Look Back," by the great documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who has died at the age of 94.

Here's the scene from "Don't Look Back" with Dylan and Donovan:



From Pennebaker's Wikipedia page:

In 1959, Pennebaker joined the equipment-sharing Filmakers' [sic] Co-op and co-founded Drew Associates with Richard Leacock and former LIFE magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew. A crucial moment in the development of Direct Cinema, the collective produced documentary films for clients like ABC News... and Time-Life Broadcast.... Their first major film, Primary (1960), documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary election. Drew, Leacock and Pennebaker, as well as photographers Albert Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and Bill Knoll, all filmed the campaigning from dawn to midnight over the course of five days. Widely considered to be the first candid and comprehensive look at the day-by-day events of a Presidential race, it was the first film in which the sync sound camera could move freely with characters throughout a breaking story, a major technical achievement that laid the groundwork for modern-day documentary filmmaking....

In 1992, during the start of the Democratic primaries, Pennebaker and Hegedus approached campaign officials for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton about filming his presidential run. They were granted limited access to the candidate but allowed to focus on lead strategist James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos. The resulting work, The War Room, became one of their most celebrated films....

Pennebaker's films, usually shot with a hand-held camera, often eschew voice-over narration and interviews in favor of a "simple" portrayal of events typical of the direct cinema style Pennebaker helped popularize in the U.S. Of such an approach, Pennebaker told interviewer G. Roy Levin published in 1971 that "it's possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don't have to label them, you don't have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it's good for you to learn." In that same interview with Levin, Pennebaker goes so far as to claim that Dont Look Back is "not a documentary at all by my standards". He instead repeatedly asserts that he does not make documentaries, but "records of moments", "half soap operas", and "semimusical reality things".

ADDED: Pennebaker's YouTube page is fantastic. I'll just give you this — Janis Joplin (from the film "Monterey Pop"):



AND: The trailer for "Jimi Plays Monterey" (released in 1986, showing a performance in 1967):



ALSO: A "Monterey Pop" outtake (that's on the Criterion Collection edition of the movie) — The Mamas and the Papas and lots of shots of people in the audience, looking very 1967:

"Nobody rocks over there" — in Europe — "They're all so... cerebral."

"They don't get down..."



"They over-intellectualize, they cerebrate, they ratiocinate excessively."

"She was feeling no pain, literally. She was interacting with the audience in almost a—well, it wasn’t almost, it was, it was..."

"... a sexual banter back and forth. They were calling up to her, they wanted her, and she wanted them. At one point in time she says, 'Yeah, I’ll take you on. One at a time. One at a time.' That was part of who she was."

From an article about newly found photographs of Janis Joplin's last concert.

I'm playing "Canyons Of Your Mind" by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

And Meade says: "What's that? Elvis?"

Me: "That's the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I'm researching the origin of the phrase 'canyons of your mind.' What do you think is the first appearance of that phrase?"

Meade: "I don't know. Glenn Campbell?"

Me: "That's 'Gentle on My Mind.'"

Now, I believe the answer to my question is "Elusive Butterfly," which was a hit in 1965 by the man who wrote the song, Bob Lind. It's rolling through the canyons of my mind this morning a propos of Florence Henderson saying that 1960s NY Mayor John Lindsay gave her the crabs. "Gentle on My Mind" was written by John Hartford in 1967.

This idea of the brain as a landscape — it's such a standard hippie trope — is it there in "Gentle on My Mind"? Yes. This singer sings of traveling alone but seeing his girlfriend "walkin' on the backroads/By the rivers flowing gentle on my mind." The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band is mocking "canyons of your mind" in 1968, but Bob Lind was serious in 1965: "You might have heard my footsteps/Echo softly in the distance through the canyons of your mind."

Also mocking the phrase was Frank Zappa in "We're Turning Again" (at 3:25):



"We can turn it around/We can do it again/We can go back in time/Through the canyons of your mind On the Eve of Destruction/We can act like we are something really special/We'll just jump in the bathtub/With that other guy Jim/And make him be more careful/We can visit Big Mama/And whap her on the back/When she eats her sandwich/We can take care of Janis..."

That's got to be much later than 1965, because Jim Morrison died in the bathtub in 1971. Yes, it's the opening track on the 1985 album "Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention." "Mothers of Prevention" referred, of course, to The Parents Music Resource Center — you know, that Tipper Gore warning-label business, against which Zappa testified before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, saying, among other things: "A couple of blowjobs here and there and — bingo! — you get a hearing."

Who knew then that in the next decade — the next canyon of the nation's mind — Tipper's husband would be Vice President, and everyone would be talking about blowjobs?

Stray fact encountered chasing the bright elusive butterfly of canyons of your mind: A movie inspired John Hartford to write "Gentle on My Mind": It was, oddly enough, "Dr. Zhivago."



ADDED: In the comments to the earlier post — the one with the Florence Henderson and the crabs — Roughcoat brought up another song, one I'd consigned to an unreachable canyon of my mind:

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the canyons of my miiiiiiiind.

That came quite late in the development of hippie tropes — in 1972. How lame, but there were takers for that kind of lameness that year. The original artists were the very douche-y Seals & Croft. And that song has been covered by many artists over the years, including by Jason Mraz (who seems perfectly Seals & Croft-y) and Type O Negative (which is odd). Also odd: I once saw Type O Negative in concert! I must say that of all the bands I saw in my days of chauffeuring teenagers to concerts, there was only one band that I couldn't find it in myself to appreciate, and that was Type O Negative. So hail, Type O Negative! And listen to the Type O Negative "Summer Breeze," here. If you need to air out your mind canyons after that, here's that nice young man Jason Mraz.

Mraz lives a health-conscious lifestyle and has said that he eats mostly raw vegan foods. His vegan diet has also influenced his music. He owns a five-and-a-half acre avocado farm in Bonsall, California. He is an investor at Café Gratitude, a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles.... His hobbies include surfing, yoga and photography.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said:

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the canyons of my miiiiiiiind.

Maybe it was unreachable because that is not how it goes!

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Roughcoat:

Oh crap, I can't believe I got it wrong--"canyons" instead of "jasmine."

The 70s was a confusing time for me. Still is, obviously.

Me:

Jasmine... Windmills...

Oh, hell....

The sudden, shocking death of Janis Joplin... the big Broadway show.

"I mean, shows close all the time — I get that. But what happened with ‘Janis’ was surreal," said one of the performers. But what was surreal?

"People Get Ready."

A fabulous 1965 recording by The Impressions. Don't confuse it with "Get Ready," by The Temptations, which is a completely different song. Some people even confuse The Impressions and The Temptations. "Get Ready," from 1966, was written by Smokey Robinson. (Here's how Smokey did it in 1979.)

As you may have noticed, I got absorbed with the word "get" earlier today. "Let's get out of here" and "You just don't get it, do you?" are 2 famously recurrent lines in movies. In the comments, I was saying:

"Get" — the word in both cliche lines — is a funny word. I've noticed that professional writers -- e.g. lawyers -- will replace the word "get" whenever they can (with seemingly more proper words like "obtain" and "acquire" and "depart" or "arrive"). It's like it's not a regular word. It's so useful we shouldn't use it.

And:

"You just don't get it" is a fascinating phrase. It was huge during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Do you remember? It's used to exert psychological pressure. You're trying to persuade someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, and you're jumping to this level of disgust and disbelief, essentially telling the person that they are dumb and isolated from all the people who already understand. It's not just that you don't agree with me already, you're some kind of outcast.

St. Croix said avoiding the word "get" is "a class thing," and professionals who avoid it are trying to sound "high class," trying "to impress." That made me do a little search to see whether the Supreme Court suppresses the word "get," and found it in only one third of the cases in the past year. Often it was a quote, like "Have you ever tried to get cow s*** out of a Prada purse?" (which is a cute low/high mix). Justice Scalia began a dissenting opinion with: "Let me get this straight..." (which might be taken as a deliberate working-class affectation). I'm seeing the word used in colloquial phrases like "get around," "get it backwards," and "get it right." Following natural speech patterns, "get" would appear much more frequently, so I say there's active suppression.

I ran across the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sentence about free speech and the marketplace of ideas:

"But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

Imagine what the standard present-day legal editor would do to that sentence: the best test of truth is the power of the thought to gain acceptance in the competition of the market. (The editor would also try to purge the passive voice by fiddling around with the subject — maybe it should be "competition" — toying with the notion of making "test" the verb, and fretting over whether "test" and "market" amount to a mixed metaphor.)

Lawyers and judges just don't get that "get" is a fine word that shouldn't be replaced by boring longer words. When it comes up naturally, as you'd use it in speech, that's where it belongs. It feels natural because it's won in the marketplace of people talking to each other over the centuries, carrying out their affairs in real time. "Got" is true.

As I said, I got — got! — absorbed in the word "get" today, and I got — got! — interested in figuring what's the best song with the word "get." A marketplace of "get" songs. "People Get Ready" won. (Look at how many cover versions there are!) Other contenders — in addition to the above-mentioned "Get Ready" — are: "I'll Get You"/"Get Back"/"Getting Better"/"Got to Get You Into My Life" (The Beatles), "Get It While You Can" (Janis Joplin), "Get Off of My Cloud" (The Rolling Stones), "Get on the Floor" (Michael Jackson), "I Get Around" (The Beach Boys); "Can I Get a Witness" (Marvin Gaye), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (The Animals).... That's just stuff easily picked from my 1960s-leaning iPod.

My point is: What a hard, sharp word! Use it.

(And: "People Get Ready" = sublime.)

"[T]he hypocrisy of pillorying a guy for using his employer’s equipment to grow marijuana..."

"... while his employer offers training in how to create a pair of substances — including one with its own mind-altering properties — that together probably do more damage to the state’s health and well-being than marijuana ever could."

Wisconsin State Journal columnist purports to detect "hypocrisy" after a University of Wisconsin researcher is arrested for growing marijuana in his university lab, when the university teaches beer brewery and has a big ice cream making plant.

Fat-choked dairy products in general are a focus of much study at the university, which regularly provides technical assistance to Dairy State dairy producers.

Given its status as the drunken-driving capital of the United States, and federal statistics that put its obesity rate of 27.7 percent, Wisconsin’s love affair with beer and ice cream might be far bigger threats than a couple joints.

Care to think about the Wisconsin economy without beer and dairy products? And the notion that more marijuana would help us out of our obesity... I'm having trouble with that line of reasoning. Wouldn't you keep eating or eat even more? Seems like your argument demands a focus on the drugs that make you skinny....

What drugs make those skinny rocks stars dreadfully skinny?...  I've always assumed that the drugs make them forget to eat, or maybe they can't afford food or the drug drives down appetite. What drugs do this?...  I want to add some authentic detail into a play I'm involved with....

The classic rock hard drug is heroin, which would definitely cause that gaunt look, and coke would be the 2nd choice. I would research those drugs...

Google "coke bloat". Makes you skinny, except in the face and tummy....

Heroin. If you're talking about the standard Janis-Joplin-oh-my-god-she-looks-like-a-skeleton-but-damn-she's-still-kinda-hot thing, it's heroin. If you're going for the where-are-her-teeth-and-what's-that-purple-thing-on-her-lip thing, methamphetamine.

So, there you have it. What you want is: heroin. Bonus: You'll be growing a very pretty flower!



Okay, all you nonhypocritical University of Wisconsinites: Cultivate your gardens!

"Time Is on My Side," "Piece of My Heart," "Cry Baby"...

... songs written by Jerry Ragovoy, whom I'd never heard of until I read his obituary just now. He died at the age of 80. His music career goes back to 1953 and doo-wop groups. He used pseudonyms. For example, on the "Cry Baby" record label, he's "Norman Meade."

And here's a great old recording that Meade and I remember fondly — "Wonderful Dream":



You can see on the label that Ragovoy produced and arranged it, but — I see in the obituary — he was also the songwriter "R. Margolies." That's from 1962.

His connection to Janis Joplin is fascinating:

Joplin recorded “Try (Just a Little Harder),” a collaboration between Mr. Ragovoy and Chip Taylor, on her first solo album, “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” Her last album, “Pearl,” included three Ragovoy songs: “My Baby,” “Get It While You Can” and “Cry Baby.” But she died, in October 1970, before she could record a song that Mr. Ragovoy, with Jenny Dean, wrote specifically for her, “I’m Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven.”

Did anyone ever record "I’m Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven"? I can't find that title in YouTube or iTunes. Searching the web, all I can see is that it was sung as the finale in a small-time show called "One Night with Janis Joplin" that played in Portland last spring and got terrible reviews ("one big hot mess").

Why R. Crumb drew an album cover for Janis Joplin, but not for Mick Jagger.

"You don't want to support that guy."

The Jonathan in that Boer War photograph is probably not the Jonathan that lives today -- fraudulently honored as the world's oldest creature.

"Since they have several giant tortoises on St Helena, they simply named the next largest one Jonathan. The date of 175 years old is being assumed because the Jonathan in the photograph of 1901 looks like the Jonathan of today. As they are very difficult to date, no one can say with any certainty that this current, reigning Jonathan is 176 or 150 or even 200."

Very difficult to date....

I guess I’m just like a turtle
That’s hidin’ underneath its hardened shell.
Whoa, whoa, oh yeah, like a turtle
Hidin’ underneath its hardened shell.
But you know I’m very well protected —
I know this goddamn life too well.

Which David wants it more — and what to do with the "wants it more" factor?

From an in-depth analysis of tonight's "American Idol" finale:

David Cook:

• He's okay with it if the prize goes to someone else - which makes voters feel less manipulated.
• A sense of neediness - if not outright desperation - is a key draw in contests like this to begin with.

David Archuleta:

• Plus: From the petrified look on his face at every single elimination round you can tell Archuleta clearly wants it more than Cook. In fact, he wants it more than anyone in "Idol" history.
• Minus: It's scary how much this kid wants it, even scarier if you speculate on what could be the real reason. You get the idea if David A. doesn't get it, that overbearing dad of his will never let him hear the end of it.

This is a complicated problem. I'm putting to the side my actual musical preference for Cook. I'm thinking about which contestant will be better off winning. Now, I think the producers want David Cook to win, because: 1. He's like Chris Daughtrey, who lost in Season 5 but has sold way more music than last season's winner, and 2. They hate Archuleta's very stage-daddy dad. But Daughtrey probably did better by losing, since it's hard enough to seem like a rocker when you've got an association with "American Idol," so Cook benefits by losing. But maybe losing is an even greater benefit for Archuleta. He needs to grow up, mature, get beyond his twerpy teeniboppitude. Nah. Let the little kid win.

ADDED: Here's some info about tonight's show. Each David will sing 3 songs: 1. chosen by Clive Davis (former chairman of Sony BMG), 2. online poll choice, and 3. singer's choice.

[Producer Nigel] Lythgoe also hinted at some kind of duet videos that will air during the finale that may include a top pop star using technology to perform alongside a dead legend.

The show pulled off a similar stunt last year by superimposing Elvis Presley's face onto an Elvis lookalike who sang along with Celine Dion.

No, what I want te see is a dead legend performing with the contestants. Since the female contestants are all gone, bring in the femininity with reanimated divas! I want to see Janis Joplin sing "Piece of My Heart" with David Cook and, for David Archuleta, Judy Garland and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."