Doing the okey-doke with Sylvia Burwell.

On "Meet the Press" this morning, Chuck Todd was talking to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, and he presented one of those amazing Jonathan Gruber clips like this: "This is how Gruber explained taxing high-end Cadillac health insurance plans and sort of doing a little 'okey-doke.'"

I had never heard "okey-doke" used like that. I only knew "okey-doke" as a cute/corny way to say "okay." I Googled and got to Ice Cube's "Don't Fade Me": "I don't fall for the okey-doke/And before I fall for the okey-doke/I let the pistol smoke." Rap Genius explains: "'Okey doke' is slang for pulling a trick on someone. Cube would rather commit murder than take care of a baby that isn’t his because the girl lied to him."

I read all the lyrics. They're pretty evil: "Then I thought deep about giving up the money/What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy... I'm thinking to myself why did I bang her/Now I'm in the closet looking for the hanger..." I get distracted into thinking about doing a parody. What rhymes with Gruber? 1. goober, 2. uber, 3. FUBAR, 3. rube err. What rhymes with Burwell? 1. Stairwell, 2. Orwell.

But who am I to parody rap songs? And I've got to finish this post.

Todd plays Burwell some Gruber, including: "This bill takes, what I call, the spaghetti approach. Which is it takes a bunch of ideas that might work and throws them against the wall, we'll see what sticks." And Todd pushes her: "He said, 'Spaghetti at the wall.'" (What rhymes with spaghetti? 1. machete, 2. already, 3. unsteady.) "And he said that the week the health care law passed. Is that what this bill is? To see what works and what doesn't?"

Burwell began: "This law is a piece of legislation that is about three fundamental things.... Affordability, access..." And I paused it so Meade could make a joke about how funny it would if she couldn't remember the third thing, Rick Perry style. But she didn't. The third thing was "quality." So affordability, access, and quality — how can that be spaghetti thrown at the wall?

Todd tried a different tack: "Is Mr. Gruber going to be welcomed back as a consultant?" Burwell evaded: "Certainly right now in terms of the work that we're doing at HHS, we are doing our work and focusing on what we are doing and our modeling." Todd attempted the old paraphrase move: "So he's not welcome back?" And Burwell utters the line that makes us laugh: "With regard to Mr. Gruber and his comments, I think I've been clear. That's something we fundamentally disagree with."

Welcome back, you're not welcome back, Gruber
Welcome back, you're never coming back, it's FUBAR
Well, the names have all changed, now there's Burwell
But those dreams have remained, they're from Orwell
That bill you called spaghetti (bill you called spaghetti)
Could you shut up already? (shut up already)
Yeah, we tease him a lot cause we've got him on the spot
Welcome back, you're never coming back....

(Apologies to John Sebastian.)

My spellcheck's questioning of the word "mystifyingly" — in the previous post — has me looking up the lyrics to the old Critters song, "Mr. Dieingly Sad."

"And when the leaves begin to fall/Answering old winter's call/I feel my tears, they fall like rain/Weeping forth the sad refrain/Blue, dark, and dim it may seem/You mark a grin, a moonbeam/Brightens your smile, pray tell me/How all the while you can be/So mystifyingly glad/I'm Mr. Dieingly Sad...."

Yes, of course, it's terrible poetry. And the video, should you accept the challenge to watch it, demonstrates how wiltingly douchey The Critters were, but there's something refreshingly delightful about plunging into this disturbingly proto-Emo pop song:



Spelling brought me to this darkeningly dismal corner of 60s music, so I've got to register my dismayingly pedagogically prissy objection to "Dieingly" instead of "Dyingly."

As long as we're talking about The Critters, here's the song you know if you only know one Critters song, "Younger Girl." I love this video, with the trippy op-art scenery into which the keyboard player camouflages. And I really think there's a moment — 1:36 —when the singer shows some shame at the pedophiliac lyrics:



The lyrics are by John Sebastian, and The Lovin' Spoonful also recorded this song: "A younger girl keeps a-rollin' 'cross my mind/And should I hang around, acting like her brother/In a few more years, they'd call us right for each other/And why, if I wait I'll just die, yeah."

All of this music is from 1966, my favorite year in music. I was 15. (In real life here at Meadhouse, Meade, who was 12 in 1966, is ad libbing "A younger boy keeps rolling across Ann Althouse's mind/He's only 12 years old and he hasn't even quit Boy Scouts yet...." That's so inappropriate and so not the slightest bit sexy.)

"I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes and they blasted me sky-high..."

I was thinking about that lyric from the Lovin' Spoonful song "Nashville Cats" this morning as we were talking about the old days when you might stay up late at night to pick up the signal of a distant radio station that played music that you couldn't hear during the day.

In that song, John Sebastian sings of a radio station that captivated him when he was 13:

And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, but I will

And so the boy from the north fell in love with country music. Me, back in the mid-1960s, I liked some college radio station that came in from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I heard songs they didn't play on WABC in New York City. Indiana seemed like a cooler place than NYC. (Oddly, I still think that sometimes.)

I used to write down the names of the artists they played that I'd never heard before. I remember, listening that way, late at night, hearing "I Got You Babe" for the first time and wrote down "Sonny and Cher."

That was my little experience. Did you have anything like that?

Consider this:

Dewey Phillips was on the air in Memphis around 1950. He was an anomaly at the time: a white DJ spinning regional rhythm and blues hits for black audiences. Rick Wright says Phillips and his African American contemporaries up the dial on Memphis' WDIA helped elevate disc jockeying to an art form.

People like Nat Turner, a young B.B. King, and, one of Wright's favorites, Rufus Thomas. "Now, Rufus comes in, 'Hey baby, this is Rufus Thomas, WDIA Memphis, Tennessee, where you can cop a smile about a quarter mile provided you've got time and don't mind this drive time line we're gonna try.'

Wright says that one Nashville station, WLAC Nashville was owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company - L-A-C. He says that that station would take this music and this DJ style to places it had never been. He says the course of American cultural history was changed one Saturday.

"And they were playing, basically, records by Guy Lombardo or whatever and it was that era of a 50,000-watter trying to find itself with no audience," says Wright. "And there were some African American students from Fiske University who had gotten past the security and got up to the station and brought a bunch of 78s with them."

And they walked into the studio and started talking to the DJ. "Mr. Nobles, can you play some of our folks' records on your radio show?"

And Nobles said sure, hand them over. Records of Fats Domino and Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Etta James, Laverne Baker.

And he played them.

"All of sudden," says Wright, "the phone started to ring, and the letters and cards were coming from all over the place. And they established that night, one of the real, first, mainstream R&B formats on a major powerhouse radio station. WLAC 1510 Blues Radio Nashville, Tennessee. The only full time R&Ber at night with 50,000 watts."

At night, 50,000 watts get you very far. Bob Dylan has said he owes much of his musical inspiration to listening to WLAC as young teenager all the way up in Minnesota.

***

It was the "Moonstruck" clip that I blogged last night that set me off thinking about Cher and the first time I ever heard her sing. It was observed that I love Cher, and I confessed to my longstanding affection for the durable diva. I loved Cher since the first time I heard 'I Got You Babe' on a radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana, I said.

I remembered answering some questionnaire at the time about what famous person I would like to be. It was 1965, so I was 14. I said Cher. And it wasn't just that I wanted to be a female pop star. I was entranced by the strong affection that Sonny and Cher showed each other when I saw them on TV.

I searched YouTube for an early appearance — perhaps their first national TV appearance — when the two were singing IGYB while sitting at a little table. They were petting and kissing — a real public display of affection. There are, of course, a lot of clips of them doing that song, but I couldn't find that one or any other where they were transgressively pawing at each other, the PDA I'd seen when I was just 14.

So let me go in a completely different direction and show you this instead...

UPDATE: The video at the end of this post has gone dead, and I don't even remember what it was.