Change sure is hard

A lot of folks didn’t know what to do with the new “rock and roll” music in the mid-1950s.

Some folks in Santa Cruz, California, thought they darn sure did know what to do about it.

On June 3, 1956, city officials decreed a complete ban on “rock-and-roll and other forms of frenzied music” at all public gatherings, and justified it because the music was “detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community.” 

Seems that a couple hundred teens in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium had been swingin’ and swayin’ to the music of Chuck Higgins and His Orchestra. Santa Cruz police arrived about midnight to check things out, and Lt. Richard Overton reported the crowd was “engaged in suggestive, stimulating and tantalizing motions induced by the provocative rhythms of an all-negro band.” Of course, the cops shut the gig down and sent everyone home.

  

What started out as a great reason to get snarky—about the older generation that just didn’t get it—quickly turned into an ugly example of completely transparent racism. 

Ken Kesey

The cops and the city fathers must have been choking on their Cheerios 10 years later when Santa Cruz was a high-profile nexus of the West Coast counterculture scene. For goodness sakes, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters hung out there.

And I guess a few more all-negro bands showed up, too.

Like, drug-infused hootenanny, y’know? 

 

The Merry Pranksters

I’m guessing that Lt. Overton figured out that change is hard.

Stretch goals

The women who helped create electronic music

Gee willikers, six miles an hour!

Ways to watch the circus

Forgive them....

Not your daddy's looking glass....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The women who helped create electronic music

Electronic music doesn’t talk to me in a real loud voice, but this piece from OpenCulture.com rings a few bells.

It’s intriguing because it mentions the not too surprising fact that women were involved in the earliest incarnations of electronic music, back in the 1950s and even earlier.

Didja ever hear of Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue or Pauline Oliveros?

I think it’s a good bet I can say “Of course you didn’t.”

OpenCulture explains that these women “represent a small sampling of too-often-overlooked electronic composers, musicians, engineers, and theorists whose work deserves wider appreciation, not because it’s made by women, but because it’s innovative, technically brilliant, and beautiful music made by people who happen to be women.”

Laurie Spiegel

Read a little bit about them and hear their ethereal music here.

Amen, sister.

I’m sticking with Odetta and Joan Baez (her early work), but this was a tantalizing interlude.

Book review: Orphan Train

Another thing I don't understand....

The wisdom of William H. Gass

$1.2 billion for coffee!?!

The good old Dewey Decimal System

That tolerance thing

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“…somewhere hot…”

Book review: A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Jimmy Buffett (b. 1946)

Ballantine Books, New York, 1998

Full disclosure: I’m not a Parrothead, but I’m related by blood and marriage to gen-you-wine Buffett fans, so I take the liberty of using familiar language, even though “the king of somewhere hot” has never seen me and isn’t likely to in this earthly paradise….

A Pirate Looks at Fifty is a memoir-ish book by Himself, written almost 20 years ago, I spotted it in the local library’s discarded book sale bin and I did the right thing.

Seems to me, for starters, no one should ever discard a book full of Jimmy Buffett stuff, he’s just so much in love with life and he is a magnet for vicarious attention, I dare you to read Pirate without getting at least a fleeting urge to head for the islands and see the world through Jimmy’s eyes.

You don’t even have to read the whole book (I confess, I didn’t), just read as much as gets the juices flowing and then get on with your regular life, and you can dip into it again any time you want. Buffett’s music and Buffett’s style are a buffet—grab what you want, anytime, sing along as the spirit moves, and go back for more whenever….

You don’t even have to like margaritas to get the full, slobbering, belly laugh, hijinksed, hot damn but mucho mellow effect when you sing along with Jimmy about the Mexican cutie and the lost shaker of salt.

I dare you not to sing a couple verses and the refrain right now, you have to, really….

Book review: American Crisis

Another thought about biographies

"...two foolish children..."

Book review: The First Congress

Book review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“Mannish Boy”….hold that thought

When McKinley Morganfield was born 103 years ago, nobody knew that he would become “the father of modern Chicago blues.”

That’s because nobody knew he was Muddy Waters. That didn’t come out right away.

Lucky for us, folklorist Alan Lomax “discovered” Muddy Waters in 1941 and made the first recordings of the unshackled voice of the blues that would make such an enduring, personal statement in the fully dimensioned classics like “Rollin’ Stone,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Got My Mojo Workin’” and “Mannish Boy.”

If you’ve never heard Muddy’s voice, listen to him here, singing:

“…I spell mmm, aaa child, nnn
That represents man
No B, O child, Y…”

Waters can make you a believer about the good qualities of a mannish boy, in a Delta blues kind of way.

He was one of the genuine musicians who seriously influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones—who took their name from the classic Muddy Waters song.

Waters didn’t have to wrap his lips around the microphone to sing his full-throated songs that invoke zest, and longing, and desperately earnest immersion in life, always up to the hilt….

His mojo never stopped working. 

Word-proof

Soda consumption is still dropping

Let's hear it for President Obama!

Book review: Dead Wake

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band

If there had been a Super Bowl in 1912, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” probably would have been the biggie in the halftime show.

This old favorite by Irving Berlin was the top tune of 1911, selling many millions of copies of….the sheet music. Most people heard the song when someone in the family sat down at the piano to tickle the ivories. The iconic Victrola phonograph was just starting to get up some steam in the consumer market, and radio didn’t go commercial until 1920.

Scott Joplin

“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” is a simple version of ragtime—Scott Joplin could have played it with one hand tied behind his back, more or less. So more or less anybody could easily learn it and play it when it was a new release before World War I.

Here's a link to a 1911 recording made a few months after the song hit the market….and here's a link to The Andrews Sisters (their career spanned 1925-1967) doing their version.

You can sing along too, you already know some of the words:

“Come on and hear, come on and hear

Alexander’s Ragtime Band…

The best band in the land

They can play a bugle call

Like you never heard before…”

Book review: Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Johnny says "drink up!"

Outsourcing: what's it all about?

Take it or leave it?

Lest we forget

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Let’s all sing “Purple Haze”

Let’s all think about singing “Purple Haze,” or not, as the case may be.

I think you can’t forget the first time you heard Jimi sing it.

If you have lost track of that memory, you might as well stop reading here because the rest of this little homage isn’t going to make much sense to you.

Hendrix wrote it before he was popular in the United States, on December 26, 1966, in his dressing room backstage at the Uppercut Club in London.

After trying to become a solo artist for two unremarkable years in New York, Hendrix was discovered by a British producer and he moved to England, where he formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience and had a UK hit in the form of “Hey Joe.” A few days after it was released, he wrote “Purple Haze” and you know the story after that.

The PH lyrics really don’t set my mind on fire, but that’s not important because Jimi was burning every time he sang it. Here’s an early version in 1967 and here’s his Woodstock rendition in 1969.

Try to read all the way to the end of the lyrics, and keep in mind that Rolling Stone kissed “Purple Haze” with a No. 17 ranking on its 2004 listing of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”

Yeah, I know, me too, “…blowing my mind…”....

Purple Haze

Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things they don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why

Excuse me while I kiss the sky

Purple haze, all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
What ever it is, that girl put a spell on me

Help me
Help me baby
Oh no, Oh no

Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh, yeah!

Purple haze all in my eyes
Don't know if it's day or night
You got me blowin', blowin' my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

Ooo
Help me
Ahh, yea-yeah, purple haze
Oh, no, oh
Oh, help me
Tell me, tell me, purple haze
I can't go on like this
Purple haze
You're makin' me blow my mind
Purple haze, n-no, nooo 

"...juice of toads."

Another poet heard from....(part 8)

Say again!?!?

Moby-Dick and stuff....

Gen. Grant kicked out the Jews....wha?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

“The Singing Nun,” remember?

My barely scientific guess is that 10-20 million Americans remember “The Singing Nun.”

If you were old enough to be interested in popular music in 1963, you know what I’m talking about.

A few years earlier, a young Belgian woman named Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers (1933-1985) had entered the order of the Missionary Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of Fichermont. As Sister Luc-Gabrielle, she played her guitar, sang songs, and wrote and recorded “Dominique” in 1961. It was a smash hit in Belgium.

The single “Dominique”—sung in French—crossed the Atlantic and was No. 1 on the American charts in December 1963. Sister Luc-Gabrielle, as “Soeur Sourire” (Smiling Nun) quickly became "The Singing Nun" in America and ritually crossed over to stardom by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in January 1964.

For the purist discophile, I’ll mention that “Dominique” was at the top of the charts for four weeks, and it blocked "Louie, Louie" by The Kingsmen from getting to No. 1.

I’ll also throw in this one, because it popped up next on YouTube after I checked out that Kingsmen classic:

Wild Thing" by The Troggs

 "...the secrets of being sharp..."

The wisdom of Sam Levenson (part 3)

...but I mean...

Book review: Thieves in the Night

The yin and yang of productivity

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

“Music in my own house? Wow!”

OK, turn off the iPod and just listen to this for a minute.

1920s crystal radio

Scientific American went out on a limb 95 years ago and told its readers:

"It has been well known for some years that by placing a form of telephone transmitter in a concert hall or at any point where music is being played the sound may be carried over telephone wires to an ordinary telephone receiver at a distant point, but it is only recently that a method of transmitting music by radio has been found possible."

Crikey, mate. Music through the air!?

Soon after World War I ended, scientists in the United States, Britain and elsewhere were actively experimenting with ways to improve radio technology that would enable its practical transformation into a full-blown communications and entertainment medium.

1920s radio station

A laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington— it owned station WWV—relied on help from amateur radio operators to explore the technical details of radio transmissions. It had some successes as early as 1919.

Scientific American was ponderously enthusiastic:

"Music can be performed at any place, radiated into the air through an ordinary radio transmitting set and received at any other place, even though hundreds of miles away…the music received can be made as loud as desired by suitable operation of the receiving apparatus…The possibilities of such centralized radio concerts are great and extremely interesting."

Until the 1920s, the only way to hear live music was to go to the concert hall. The only way to hear whatever music you chose, any time you chose, was to own the record and a phonograph machine.

Let’s not even get started on television.

The art of Mahalia Jackson

Make a new life....

Drifters

Book review: Saint Martin's Summer

The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

“…another little piece of my heart…”

On the one hand, prose; on the other hand, atomic prose.

Likewise, poetry and atomic poetry.

Getting’ right down to the real nitty gritty is a deep mystery and an elevating challenge for any writer.

Narrative Magazine recently posted a brief bit about “six-word stories.” I quote:

“William Faulkner famously said that a novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.”

Here’s a six-word story from Hemingway Himself:

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

Another, from Alistair Daniel, a British writer:

“Without thinking, I made two cups.”

Try this one, I think you can sing it: (1)

“…another little piece of my heart…”

(1) From "Piece of My Heart" by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, immortalized by Janis Joplin

No surprise here

"...the hollow men..."

The rain comes in...

Always

Yes, singing

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Beatles’ first US concert: short and sweet

The Beatles started their first North American concert tour 51 years ago, on August 19, 1964, in San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

That first concert lasted 38 minutes. The Fab Four had to leave the arena under cover—in an ambulance—because the 17,130 fans went berserk.

They played 12 songs:

“Twist and Shout”

“You Can’t Do That”

“All My Loving”

”She Loves You”

“Things We Said Today”

“Roll Over Beethoven”

“Can’t Buy Me Love”

“If I Fell”

“I Want to Hold Your Hand”

“Boys”

“A Hard Day’s Night”

“Long Tall Sally”

My fave is “Roll Over Beethoven.”  It’s “a rockin’ rhythm record.” I guess you already know that.

By the way, Chuck Berry wrote the song in 1956.

Woodstock: that was a music thing, right?

Book review: Address Unknown

Woodstock: that was a music thing, right?

Guacamole is an Aztec word

Same old, same old....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Woodstock: that was a music thing, right?

The pleasure palace at Woodstock opened 46 years ago, on August 15, 1969.

Wasn’t there. Didn’t do that. Maybe you did. So, you can have my share of the memories.

As it happened, I was at Fort Benning near Columbus, GA, doing officers’ infantry basic training. 

Not saying that was a better way to spend some summer days in August. One thing: seems like we probably had better weather in Georgia, the Woodstockers got rain several times.

Of course, no one is surprised whenever I mention (at least four times in the last 46 years) that I didn’t go to Woodstock. Even if I hadn’t been on active duty, I wouldn’t have gone.

Wasn’t my thing.

But it was a big thing.

Woo hoo.

Science ruins everything....

"...the very best story of diablerie..."

Guacamole is an Aztec word

Same old, same old....

Beguiled by speed....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Color me Beale Street

It just doesn’t seem all that important to ask if white folks and black folks listen to music the same way.

It’s about the music, right?

The music is the thing, it’s an ancient part of our human culture and our lives.

Still, the question is out there.

In a New York Times review of a couple books about the richly notorious Beale Street in Memphis and all the music that got started there, James Gavin reports a bit of repartee from Al Bell, former co-owner of Stax Records in Memphis. Stax had an impressive stable of big names: Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and others. Bell told their story in just a few words: “When the white audiences discovered us, we didn’t get whiter—they got blacker.”

Years ago I saw a video of a session Wynton Marsalis did with black high school kids in New York City. He played his trumpet, and talked a bit. One of the kids asked him something like “When you play for white folks, is it different than when you play for black folks?”  The world-renowned jazzman took a moment, then said “No, it’s pretty much the same no matter who loves my music….except, white folks snap their fingers on the downbeat.”

Hey, listen with whatever finger you like, that’s what I say.

"all-negro band"?....change is hard

Don't hang up on the kids....

Sgt. Pepper....almost 50 years old

The Babe's last homer

My teachers

There is only one Bond.

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.