Too literal?

"Keepin' Out of Mischief Now" is the song Elvis Costello says he'd like played at his funeral.

Goodbye to Fats Domino.

One of the last truly great ones of early rock and roll has died. He was 89.

NYT obit:

Mr. Domino had more than three dozen Top 40 pop hits through the 1950s and early ’60s, among them “Blueberry Hill,” “Ain’t It a Shame,” “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans.” Throughout he displayed both the buoyant spirit of New Orleans, his hometown, and a droll resilience that reached listeners worldwide.

He sold 65 million singles in those years, with 23 gold records, making him second only to Elvis Presley as a commercial force. Presley acknowledged Mr. Domino as a predecessor.

“A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” Presley told Jet magazine in 1957. “But rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

Read the whole obit. Excerpt:

Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. was born on Feb. 26, 1928, the youngest of eight children in a family with Creole roots....

Music filled his life from the age of 10, when his family inherited an old piano. After his brother-in-law Harrison Verrett, a traditional-jazz musician, wrote down the notes on the keys and taught him a few chords, Antoine threw himself at the instrument — so enthusiastically that his parents moved it to the garage.

He was almost entirely self-taught, picking up ideas from boogie-woogie masters like Meade Lux Lewis, Pinetop Smith and Amos Milburn. “Back then I used to play everybody’s records; everybody’s records who made records,” he told Offbeat magazine in 2004. “I used to hear ’em, listen at ’em five, six, seven, eight times and I could play it just like the record because I had a good ear for catchin’ notes and different things.”

He attended the Louis B. Macarty School but dropped out in the fourth grade to work as an iceman’s helper. “In the houses where people had a piano in their rooms, I’d stop and play,” he told USA Today in 2007. “That’s how I practiced.”...

In that racially segregated era, white performers used his hits to build their careers. In 1955, “Ain’t It a Shame” became a No. 1 hit for Pat Boone as “Ain’t That a Shame,” while Domino’s arrangement of a traditional song, “Bo Weevil,” was imitated by Teresa Brewer....

Now, "Blueberry Hill," which I — who listened to AM Top 40 radio back then — remember as his biggest hit, was a Glenn Miller tune in the 1940s, but Miller got it from Louis Armstrong. Here's Fats on Ed Sullivan in 1956:



ADDED: I'm wrong about "Blueberry Hill." Miller didn't get it from Armstrong. The Armstrong recording was 1949. Miller was 1940, but there were 6 different "Blueberry Hill" recordings in 1940:

Victor Records released the recording by the Sammy Kaye Orchestra with vocals by Tommy Ryan on May 31, 1940 (catalog #26643, with the flip side "Maybe"; matrix #51050[1]). Gene Krupa's version was issued on OKeh Records (#5672) on June 3 and singer Mary Small did a vocal version on the same label with Nat Brandwynne's orchestra, released June 20, 1940 on OKeh Records #5678. Other 1940 recordings were by: The Glenn Miller Orchestra on Bluebird Records (10768), Kay Kyser, Russ Morgan, Gene Autry (also in the 1941 film The Singing Hill), Connee Boswell, and Jimmy Dorsey. The largest 1940 hit was by The Glenn Miller Orchestra, where it reached #1.

It was a Tin Pan Alley composition, with the music by Vincent Rose (born Vincenzo Cacioppo, in Palermo, Italy) and lyrics by Larry Stock (who was born in Budapest, Hungary) and Al Lewis (born in NYC and not to be confused with the Al Lewis we knew and loved as Grandpa Munster).

Race and pop culture is an important subject, and I was wrong to assume I knew the time line of inspiration and borrowing.

Does jibe/jive jibe/jive with your sense of spelling?

In the first post of today, there's a quote about a white supremacist troll who "listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses."

In the comments, Tom B said,  "JIBE not JIVE you f*%#ing @&*%! aaaaaaaaaaah," and The Godfather said "Thanks, Tom B: You screamed so I don't have to," and holdfast said: "That's ok, I speak Jive"... which is that flies above all controversy.

But for the last word...

Records From My Father, Part 4: "Manhattan Tower."

I had made my selection for the next entry in the Records From My Father series before doing that last blog post, showing the New Yorker cover making an Anthony Weiner phallic joke out of the Empire State Building. Here's the album cover for "Manhattan Tower," showing the Chrysler Building.



This record might be the polar opposite of a Weiner sext. It's very grand and striving, with lush orchestration, florid singing, and spoken narration. It acts like it's telling a momentous love story, a story that could only happen in New York City, a story on the scale of the Manhattan skyscrapers, but there's nothing important at all about Steve and Julie, who meet in a bar, go to a few New York places, and then separate. This was very hard to sit through, and I have a hard time believing my father found it too amusing.

Elvis Costello finds himself "unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire."

The statement is, of course, getting far more publicity for his fancy gift box of 3 CDS, vinyl record, concert DVD, and book — which you can buy for $202 here — than some effort urging you to buy the darned thing. A nice publicity gambit, since people — including Drudge — have fallen for it. Elvis thinks you'd be better off paying $150 for this collection of 10 Louis Armstrong CDS. Which is probably true, making you like him all the more... and want to buy his boxed set because he's so amusingly self-effacing.

"Do Not Feed Donuts To Your Obese Children."

"Every time I read something about childhood obesity... this Tim Minchin song starts to play in my head. Yes, it's harsh, brutal even, very nearly bullying. But... um... you gotta admit that there's a grain Cinnabun or two of truth to it."

Says Dan Savage — who needs to say more about what he really thinks about the role of bullying in the process of growing up. He writes about bullying a lot and I think his promotion of this song shows he's not too consistent about it. Is it that it's bad to bully gay kids but good to bully fat kids — because it's good to be gay but bad to be fat? Bullying is a mechanism of social control. Is the mechanism itself wrong, or is the wrong limited to using the mechanism for the wrong end?

By the way, it's Cinnabon — "bon" as in "C'est Si Bon" — and you can be a fan of it on Facebook.



ADDED: The awesomeness of that Jane Morgan video made me pick it over a couple of fabulous alternatives. Check out Eartha Kitt and Louis Armstrong.

How do we feel about The Who at the Super Bowl?

This is a music act from 40+ years ago. Imagine if in the first Super Bowl, in 1967, the half-time show featured musicians who peaked in 1927. No. It's not imaginable. The strange dominance of My Generation is unfathomable. I hope I die before I get old. Ah ha ha ha. That was just something we said to throw everyone — even ourselves — off the track. We meant to take our stand and dominate as long as we possibly could.

Smile and grin at the change all around... pick up my guitar and play... just like yesterday....

How terribly, terribly strange. I've loved The Who since I first heard "I Can't Explain" on the radio. I was 14. Loved them so much I joined their fan club before their first album was even released in the United States. I'll always love the 60s Who. Even though I got tired of what they were in the 70s, I'm happy to see them still playing now. Pete Townshend is 65. It's cool that he can rotate his arm all around like that, let alone actually pick up his guitar and play. Just like yesterday. The Who, now a duet, takes the gigantic stage.

Ah! I'm getting old. Why don't we all fade away?

IN THE COMMENTS: TheGiantPeach said:

Actually, in 1967, if they had hit on the concept of half-time entertainment that went beyond marching bands, they could very well have featured Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who were popular 40 years earlier.

In fact, two of the early Super Bowls to feature performers were tributes to Armstrong and Ellington in the year after their deaths.