Lindsey

When I heard that Lindsey Graham had died suddenly of a heart condition just a couple of days after turning 71, I was shocked.  And when Americans who despise Trump and his lapdogs reacted in a cavalier manner toward news of Graham's death, I was not shocked.  In fact, I wasn't even surprised.  Because I was just as nonchalant about the news as well.

 

Lindsey Graham's service as a U.S. Representative and as a U.S. Senator from South Carolina was not anything to celebrate.  In fact, apart from Fritz Hollings, I can't think of one U.S. Senator from South Carolina whose service is anything to celebrate.  He spent the Clinton impeachment hearings trying to look like the reasonable Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.  And to be fair, Lindsey Graham was the only Republican on the committee to vote against an article of impeachment against Bill Clinton, voting no on the second article  that held President Clinton responsible for perjury in a sexual-harassment lawsuit and  explaining that he did so in order to give the President "the legal benefit of the doubt" due to an unclear definition of sexual relations used in that case.  That particular article was one of four voted out of the committee and sent to the full House, and it was one of two that did not pass. But at the same time, Graham sai that pursuing the indictment of President Clinton was the surest way to rid the Presidency of the stain of dishonor bestowed on it.

So why did he get behind Donald Trump?  Especially when, as a presidential candidate in 2016 himself, he dismissed Trump as a racist misogynistic xenophobe?   

Graham was probably the most impressive 2016 Republican presidential candidate, which tells you more about the Republican Party's already-declining standards by 2016 than it does about Graham's credentials.

As a U.S. Senator, he was a nice guy who was able to broker deals with his back-slapping, easy-going attitude, but when it came to achieving greatness in the Senate and being talked about in the same breath as Robert Taft, Lyndon Johnson, or Howard Baker, he preferred to attach himself like a leech to greatness, hanging out with John McCain and Joe Lieberman for a shred of tangential legitimacy.  He abandoned policies he'd supported when it was convenient to be for them as soon as it was more expedient to be against him.  

His zealous capitulation to Trump, though, is what Graham is most likely going to be remembered for.  He wanted to curry favor with Trump to, as the song from Hamilton goes, be in the room where it happens.  Now that he's in purgatory for his transgressions, what happens next in Washington may be the sort of horrible thing that wouldn't have happened if Graham hadn't taken sycophancy to new heights under the Trump regime.

Clive, We Hardly Knew Ye

Clive Davis, who died at 94, was one of the giants in the music business.  Many of the artists he supported were all about music, while he was the business.  He scored a fantastic deal with Neil Diamond at Columbia,  discovered Janis Joplin and signed Bruce Springsteen when he was at that label, developed Patti Smith's career, and resurrected the careers of Aretha Franklin and Graham Parker by signing them at Arista, the label he founded in the mid-seventies.

But while Clive Davis was a great man, he was not always a good man.  Black women - you know where this is going, right? - have taken to social media to set the record straight about how he handled the careers of artists of their race and their sex.  As the head of Arista, he tried to push Phyllis Hyman into recording more contemporary pop and disco in the late seventies when she insisted on remaining true to her jazz roots, and when he brought Angela Bofill to Arista, he promoted her at Hyman's expense, causing an immediate rift between the two women.  He had even more success with promoting Whitney Houston, but her own records were a disappointment to many critics who found her to be a formidable virtuoso who recorded the blandest, weakest songs ever conceived.  In Essex County, New Jersey, where Whitney Houston was born and raised (and where I was born and have lived for fifty of my sixty years, so I know a thing or two about this), the disappointment bordered on disgust, where black listeners familiar with Houston's gospel chops were incensed at how watered down her pop sound was.  

And the disgust many people felt with Davis goes beyond black women.  Kelly Clarkson called Davis a bully and said his handling of her recording career was toxic, and Kelly Clarkson is one of America's pop sweethearts, so her take on Davis ought to be taken more seriously.  One didn't need to be a music-business outsider to note Davis's commercial and artistic missteps throughout the years.  He signed Barry Manilow to Columbia in 1973, then brought him to Arista a year later when he and Columbia parted ways, and he chose to guide Manilow into a weird Tin Pan Alley-pop-rock bombast sound for much of Manilow's career.  He managed to sign the one supergroup of the eighties that had potential - the KBC Band, a band comprised of Jefferson Airplane alumni Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, and Jack Casady - only to give them inadequate promotion, leading to their swift dissolution, even as Davis signed the short-lived GTR, whose only album you already know about. 

Perhaps Davis's most egregious blunder, apart from promoting Sean Combs by giving him tons of money (and I prefer not to talk about what happened to him!), was issuing Milli Vanilli's only album on Arista in the United States at the end of 1988, which became the biggest selling-album of 1989 and probably the biggest-selling album of the 1980s apart from Michael Jackson's Thriller.  Milli Vanilli's LP sold ten million copies and spawned four huge hit singles.  When it turned out that Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, the Vanilli boys in question, weren't the real singers on the record, Davis responded with a defense commonly used by President Ronald Reagan through the last years of his administration - he knew nothing about it.

But even if Pilatus and Morvan weren't the real singers - and I don't want to dump on the duo because they've been shamed enough already - the fact that Arista used all sorts of promotional hijinks to push ten million copies of a record with lifeless vocalizing and soulless performances suggests a real lack of ethics at the label, as well as disregard for a scandal which Davis, even if he didn't know about the deception, should have been on top of. 

The Reagan reference notwithstanding, Clive Davis may very well have been the Richard Nixon of the music business - he had the power to do good, he had the power to do evil, and he did both.  It's a complicated legacy, yes, but if the results of Davis's career include giving Graham Parker the opportunity to record Squeezing Out Sparks - an album I love and haven't written about on this blog yet - I'm not going to be too judgmental.   

Man of the People

When Jesse Jackson first ran for President in 1984, he was considered a symbolic candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, because President Reagan was a shoo-in for re-election.  When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination again in 1988, he was running to win.  Not necessarily win the nomination - establishment Democrats, who have historically screwed things up for the party in the past four decades, had established the idea of "superdelegates" to prevent that, as Jackson's peer and brother in arms Bernie Sanders would later find out - but to win a better future for America.

Jesse Jackson, who died at 84 last week, was never going to win the Presidency - not because he was black, but because he espoused policies that had fallen out of favor with mainstream America, such as federal aid to urban areas, single-payer health care, and affirmative-action benchmarks for employment (which has since morphed into diversity, equity and inclusion).  Progressive policies had fallen out of favor in the 1980s at the expense of a supply-side economic policy of incentives for corporations to produce more goods and employ more people, free-market competition, and deregulation of financial institutions.  All of that failed.  Which is why, ironically, Jackson was also ahead of his time.  He was a harbinger of the early-twenty-first-century movement spearheaded by Bernie Sanders.

Jackson was fully committed to civil rights long after the movement faded in the 1970s in the mistaken assumption that the heavy lifting had been done and moderation in the pursuit of incremental progress was all that was needed going forward.  Jackson was prescient enough to know that much more was needed to be done still, and he never wavered from that.  But, in his campaign for economic justice through his group People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH) and for reconciliation with the nation's adversaries (he famously embraced Yasir Arafat and helped free an American serviceman by negotiating with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad), Jackson expanded beyond the Rainbow Coalition, which he called the political operation representing his core supporters.  When he established the Rainbow Coalition in 1984, it represented only a single hue - black.  By 1988, he'd added white and brown to his color chart, attracting white farmers in Iowa facing foreclosure, Mexican-American fieldworkers in the corporate farms of California, and Puerto Rican domestic workers in East Harlem, as well as a multiracial assemblage of industrial workers in the Rust Belt who'd seen the desire for corporations to make more money and reward shareholders instead of employees lead to their jobs going overseas.  The 1980s ended as unhappily as they'd begun - George H.W. Bush locked Reagan's conservative revolution in place - but Jesse Jackson inspired people to dream bigger, he got more minorities to register to vote, he ran a pair of presidential campaigns that cleared the path for Barack Obama to win the Presidency, and he encouraged people to "keep hope alive."  (The Rainbow Coalition and PUSH ultimately merged, becoming the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition.)

Jesse Jackson never tired.  He fought back against one wave of right-wing activism after another, be it the Gingrich revolution, 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush tax cuts, or the Tea Party movement.  Now, with MAGA beginning to falter and the movement Jackson nurtured and Sanders assumed breaking through, it seems like we as a people could soon get to the Promised Land.  The Reverend Jackson obviously won't get there with the rest of us, but he was in the fight long enough to make it possible for the rest of us to get there.  Unlike his mentor Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson found that longevity had a place for him.

I never supported Jesse Jackson for President for one simple reason - I felt that, having held no previous elective office or had no previous military service, he was not qualified.  (Alas, those two deficiencies failed to stop Donald Trump in 2016.)  But I did support what he stood for. I still do.  RIP. 

Psychos. Killers.

Donald Trump has a new theory involving Joe Biden.  He thinks that Biden was executed in 2020 after a military tribunal and was replaced with an animatronic robot.  He apparently found out after studying the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and concluded that it was Biden's hand being extended over Paul McCartney's head.  

And also, he found the smoking-gun clue by listening to the 2021 fiftieth-anniversary remaster of the Doors' L.A. Woman at a speed two semitones lower than the proper pitch.  At the lower semitone, Jim Morrison, instead of singing "Mr. Mojo risin'" on the title track, is actually singing, "We killed old Joe Biden."

Also, if you listen closely to Ray Manzarek's extended organ solo on "Riders On the Storm," Morrison can be heard whispering in the background, I'm faking my death in Paris and moving to Johannesburg."

Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) defended cuts to Medicare and Medicaid at a town hall in Iowa, during which a constituent expressed fair that, without necessary health care, people were going to die.  Ernst replied that, eventually, we are all going to die.  (In the long run, we are all dead.  Sounds familiar.)  Ernst later apologized - well, not really - saying in a video taped in a cemetery that she "made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth . . ..  So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well."  And then she revealed her own health-care plan: "But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

Jesus Christ is reported to have said in response, "Oh, Me." 

Personally, I think Joni Ernst was killed in a freak accident in England in which a stone from the Tower of London got dislodged and fell on her head and she has since been replaced by a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's.  

In a normal country - say, Finland - a President believing in conspiracies about replacing dead people with robots and a lawmaker whose solution to a longer, healthier life is embracing the promise of eternal life after death would be a reason for dissolving the government and calling for new elections.  The Constitution doesn't have a provision like that, of course, mainly because Washington and Franklin never dreamed that people in the government would be this stupid. 

I'm now going to listen to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." backwards.  Maybe I can find out what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. 😀

RIP Pope Francis

I was shocked to learn of Pope Francis's death after he appeared to be on the mend from an illness.  He was a pope as a pope should be, caring for the poor, speaking out for migrants, and being tolerant toward homosexuals as well as reconciling faith in the Savior to the need to preserve the environment.

Unfortunately, he did not change the trajectory of the Roman Catholic Church permanently, as the Church eventually drifts back to a more traditionalist ideology once a more modern pope leaves the scene.  There are some virulent critics of Francis in positions of power in both Europe and North America, and in the U.S., that goes double.  The American Church has too many cardinals and archbishops who bristle at reform and remain rooted in reactionism.  Many of them opposed Francis's efforts to modernize the Church, and some of them, like Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York - the closest the United States to a primate, or a national Church patriarch - has been friendly to Donald Trump.

It is the specter of Trump which the Church must fight back against in the same way Pope John Paul II led his energies in the fight against the leadership of the Soviet Union.  Trump has already compromised the global community with his intransigence, his bigotry, and his narcissism.  The Roman Catholic Church should be as strong a bulwark against the fascist tyranny of Trump as it was against Soviet Communism.  

While many of the faithful fear an emergence of an American-backed pontiff who will pursue a temporally arch-conservative agenda, we ought to just catch our collective breath and calm down once Francis' funeral is behind us and just sit back and take it easy through the interregnum.  

The Big Guy

As if the news of the election results weren't bad enough to fill me with pain and sorrow, I learned that the last surviving original member of one of the most criminally underappreciated R&B bands of the seventies just died.

Harry Williams, one of the members of the original lineup of the Kansas City group Bloodstone, was the linchpin for the group's overall sound.  All of them sang lead vocals, but Williams was the only member who did not play an instrument (other than rudimentary percussion).  His main instrument was his voice, which he used to great effect, whether he delivered a tender ballad rendition of the pop standard "Little Green Apples" or a boisterous wail on Bloodstone's cover of Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)."  He was also a strong songwriter, despite his lack of instrumental ability; he wrote Bloodstone's 1973 single "Never Let You Go," which features a sinuous melody and funky groove.  Here, as a performer, Williams displayed the totality of his vocal range in a song that was better written than even the group's signature hit, bassist/vocalist Charles McCormick's "Natural High," which came out that same year.

In recent years, Williams, who turned eighty this past June, was confined to a wheelchair, but he continued to tour with replacement Bloodstone members Donald Brown and Charles McCaleb.  His massive physique - I called him the Big Guy for that reason - was less imposing in the unusual posture (for a singer) of sitting, but his voice remained strong.  So did demand for Bloodstone's shows on the rhythm-and-blues circuit, even though the band hadn't released an album of new material since 2004  (barring a Christmas record), as it was on the R&B charts and on black-oriented pop-music shows like Don Cornelius' "Soul Train" where Bloodstone found their most loyal fans.

Bloodstone has surely died with Williams, as Brown's only connection to the group has been with Williams and two of the original members, McCormick and guitarist/vocalist Charles Love (Brown replaced guitarist/vocalist Willis Draffen, who died in 2002), and McCaleb, who replaced McCormick when he died in 2022, has barely made a mark on the group.  It's a reminder in these horrible times for popular music that its dearest stars are slowly fading away, as the entire lineups of Thunderclap Newman, the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Four Tops, and the Ramones are no longer with us as well.  We still have the records.  Thanks for the memories, Big Guy.  RIP.  

Mr. Volkswagen

I just learned today by chance, on what would have been his birthday, that former Volkswagen CEO Carl Hahn died back in January of this year (2023) at the age of 96.  Note to American television news: You suck!  Though to be fair, he died just a couple of days after Elvis Presley's daughter, so his obitaury was probably overshadowed considerably.

That out of the way, I am sad to hear this news.  Carl Hahn was hardly just another Volkswagen executive.  Apart from Heinz Nordhoff,  who got the fledgling company up and running after the Second World War, Hahn is the most important figure in VW's postwar history.  He is the only man to serve as both president of Volkswagen of America and as CEO of Volkswagen AG.  He started the Beetle on its upward sales trajectory in the U.S. and he later built Volkswagen into a global powerhouse.

When Hahn first arrived in the United States in 1959, the Beetle was selling in respectable but miniscule quantities.  Most advertising for the Beetle was local, varying from one metropolitan area to another, and Detroit dominated the U.S. automotive with its pushy, glitzy ad campaigns.  After deciding to hire an advertising agency to compete with the Big Three, whose own small cars were just beginning to come onto the market, Hahn soon found himself disgusted with the cookie-cutter advertising for the Volkswagen that each agency he went to offered.  Then he went to Doyle Dane Bernbach a small New York agency whose co-founder Bill Bernbach, a Jew, had numerous Jewish businesses such as Ohrbach's department store and Levy's rye bread as clients and was known for producing ads with subtle, cheeky Borscht Belt humor.  Doyle Dane Bernbach roved to be the right fit for Volkswagen, as its propose advertising, rather than try to hype the car with gimmickry and novelty value, would instead admit to its small size, its odd shape, and its noisy engine.  The plan was to turn these deficiencies into assets, explaining how the car was fuel-efficient, inexpensive to buy and maintain, and how its improvements were under the skin.  Volkswagen, Doyle Dane Bernbach planned to stress, would not focus on how the car was changed on the surface to look better but how it was changed underneath to last longer.  Yes, the car was small, underpowered and even ugly . . . but it got you where you wanted to go. 

Hahn found Doyle Dane Bernbach's approach refreshing and he found Bernbach and his partners to be men of integrity.  He went ahead and hired the agency, and it created the most memorable ad campaign in history. 

The ads  Doyle Dane Bernbach created would send Beetle sales skyrocketing in the U.S., and they became as much as part of the pop-culture landscape as the Beetle itself and the Microbus.  Doyle Dane Bernbach would get the ad account for Volkswagen globally, and it would ultimately do business for Volkswagen of America for 36 years.  It also diluted the stigma against Volkswagen; a Jewish ad agency, was selling Hitler's car.  The years that Hahn and his successor, Stuart Perkins, spent running Volkswagen of America were the most fruitful for the German automaker in the United States.  The house that Hahn built - the Volkswagen of America headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey - became the preeminent import-car business in America.  His faith in the Beetle earned him the affectionate nickname "Mr. Volkswagen" from American VW enthusiasts.

After a stint as CEO of Continental Tire in the seventies, Hahn returned to Volkswagen to become chairman in 1982, and his eleven years at the helm of Volkswagen AG saw the greatest expansion in the firm's postwar history.  Having inherited the new line of water-cooled, front-engine automobiles such as the Mark 1 Golf / Rabbit and the Scirocco, Hahn sought more markets for Volkswagen.  He invested in a small manufacturing plant in China, setting the stage for VW's phenomenal growth there, and would also set up Volkswagen dealer networks in the newly liberated Eastern European countries and as well as former Soviet republics such as the Baltic States.  Hahn's takeover of other automakers at this time was fueled by a vision  that was as romantic as it was opportunistic; he acquired Spain's SEAT and Czechoslovakia's Škoda, two companies that had once been the wards of totalitarian governments as Volkswagen had been, and modernized their lineups, freeing them from their authoritarian past as Volkswagen had been.  He also assumed control of the assets of VEB Sachsenring, the East German automaker that made Trabants, and converted the Zwickau factory into a modern plant, which now makes the electric ID.3 hatchback.  Hahn himself, in fact, had been born and raised nearby in Chemnitz and escaped to West Germany with his father, an executive at Auto Union (the forerunner of the modern Audi brand), and his mother when Auto Union relocated to Ingolstadt as Chemnitz fell into the Soviet zone of the occupation of Germany after World War II. 

One accomplishment Hahn failed to achieve as Volkswagen CEO, ironically, was the resuscitation of Volkswagen's U.S. division after it had languished in the face of stiff competition from the Japanese and Detroit.  After an making initial effort at improving sales in the United States and introducing the GTI to the country, Hahn more or less left Volkswagen of America to its own devices and concentrated on growing the business elsewhere.  By the time he retired in 1993, Volkswagen sales in the U.S. had sunk so low that it almost left the U.S. entirely.  Hahn, who had established Volkswagen in America, came extremely close to being remembered as the man who let the brand die in the U.S. market.  Only the strong actions by his successor as Volkswagen chairman, Ferdinand Piëch, prevented such an outcome.

Hahn's record is still admirable.  Under his time as Volkswagen AG chairman, the company not only expanded globally but produced exciting products such as the the Rallye Golf, the third-generation Passat, the third-generation Golf and Jetta, and the awesome Corrado sports coupe.  The incredible 16V engine and the G supercharger were also created in that time.  The cars became more advanced, more stylish, and increasingly fun to drive.  Hahn understood the meaning of Volkswagen - solid transportation at an affordable price with driving pleasure.  It showed in the way Americans embraced the Beetle in the sixties and American VW enthusiasts revered such cars as the Golf GTI and the Jetta GLI as well as the base Jetta in the eighties.  It's too bad that today's managers of Volkswagen of America - who would rather sell American-style SUVs than live up to VW's German heritage - don't get that.  RIP, Carl Hahn. 😢 

She, Tina

Bob Dylan once gave a warning to John Fogerty that succinctly describes Tina Turner's awesome talent.  Fogerty had been wary of performing Creedence Clearwater Revival songs in concert when he resumed his solo career in the 1980s for reasons too random and complicated to explain, but Dylan convinced him he had to step up to the plate and claim his old songs.  If he didn't, Dylan told him, people would "remember 'Proud Mary' as Tina Turner's song." 

That was Tina Turner in a nutshell (or a Nutbush).  Turner, who died this past Wednesday at 83, could take any song and make it her own, and if it was a cover of a song originally recorded by its composer, the composer had to be prepared to defend it.  Her covers of "Proud Mary" and the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman" with her then-husband Ike threatened to eclipse the originals, and a generation of Americans who discovered her in the eighties with her Private Dancer LP probably know her cover of David Bowie's "1984" (released on Private Dancer in 1984) better than Bowie's original.  "The Best" (not, as many people believe, titled "Simply the Best"), released in 1989, is Turner's signature song, but how many people are aware that Bonnie Tyler - no slouch herself when it comes to interpreting a song - had released her own version of the Mike Chapman-Holly Knight composition a year earlier?  

Professional songwriters who don't perform the songs they write could always count on Tina Turner to record definitive versions of their songs, and she could also take the slightest song and give it more meaning.  For every solidly written song she was given, like "Better Be Good To Me," she was handed a lightweight tune like "What's Love Got To Do With It," but she didn't just make "What's Love Got To Do With It" her own song,  she gave it more depth and more meaning.  She could also rescue a well-known bad song.  "State of Shock," the 1984 song that Michael Jackson and his brothers did with Mick Jagger, is a piece of junk, a piece of crap that makes the case that the eighties were, by and large, a horrible decade for popular music.  At Live Aid, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner performed "State of Shock" together and it sounded fantastic. Tina could redeem anything with her amazing talent. 

Songwriters were happy to give her their songs.  When Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler, a voice of sanity in the musically insane decade that was the 1980s, wrote "Private Dancer" and knew instinctively that it was not a Dire Straits song and ought to be given to a woman to sing, he probably never even considered giving it to any woman other than Tina Turner.

I saw Tina Turner twice in concert - at the aforementioned Live Aid concert in 1985 (yes, I was at Live Aid, but it's nothing to brag about, as Woodstock it wasn't, no matter what Joan Baez said)  and again at the Meadowlands in New Jersey later that year.  Both of Turner's performances were amazing, and she commanded the stage both times - even at Live Aid, where her entire performance was duetting with Jagger.  It's why she, not Janis Joplin, is called the Queen of Rock and Roll, and it's a damn shame that no classic-rock radio playlist seems to want to acknowledge that.  RIP. 😢

The Voice of Canada

Gordon Lightfoot, who died this past May 1, had long been referred to as the Canadian Bob Dylan, but to Canadians he was much more than that.  He was the spokesman fro Canadian life, pride, and culture.  Go beyond his ballads and you'll find a wealth of songs celebrating the Great White North, from the serenity of sailing on Lake Huron in "Christian Island (Georgian Bay)," the majestic mountain ranges of "Alberta Bound," or  the epic building of the nation in "Canadian Railroad Trilogy."  Lightfoot's status as a Canadian also allowed him to look critically at the neighbor across the border, such as "Black Day In July," documenting the mayhem of the 1967 Detroit riot,  But even his best ballads, such as "Did She Mention My Name?", Beautiful," and "If You Could Read My Mind" betrayed a sense of modesty that was particularly Canadian in the understatement and lyrical honesty, and songs such as "Sundown" were just plain frank.  What American singer-songwriter would ever admit to times "when I feel like I'm winning when I'm losing again?"

And, truth be told, Gordon Lightfoot wasn't really the Canadian Bob Dylan.  But maybe Dylan was the American Gordon Lightfoot.  Consider this earlier assessment of Lightfoot from Dylan himself: "I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever. . .. Lightfoot became a mentor for a long time. I think he probably still is to this day."

RIP. 😢 

Jimmy Guterman: 1962-2016

About a decade after I read his and Owen O'Donnell's 1991 anti-classic book "The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time," I joined music critic Jimmy Guterman's message board, which he'd set up for anyone who wanted to join him and take on his and O'Donnell's opinions about rock and roll.  (Guterman wrote a solo sequel, "The Best Rock and Roll Records of All Time," in 1992.)  Along with O'Donnell himself, a group of us bantered about and debated the merits of various artists and what constitutes a great rock and roll record.  Jimmy and I vehemently disagreed on Crosby, Stills and Nash and on Jethro Tull, as he despised both groups and I like Tull a lot and flat-out love CSN.  But we did have areas of agreement - we both loved the Band's second album and we both thought the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed was pretentious drivel.  He got me to concede that a good deal of art rock is bad, but he never convinced me that all art rock is bad, as I stuck to my pea shooters and defended Pink Floyd.  Also, he introduced me to Fairport Convention; I introduced him to Family.  It was all good fun and in good fun, but after a few years, Jimmy pulled the plug on his message board, and we and our fellow participants drifted apart.  

Jimmy drifted so far apart from my own orbit that I didn't find out until this past weekend that he died back in late July of 2016. 

I was stunned, as Jimmy was only a few years older than I, and the apparent cause of death was suicide.  From what I understand, he was dissatisfied with how his life was going, particularly his career.   

In discussing rock and roll,  Jimmy gave as good as he got and he made me reconsider my assumptions about rock and roll and actually made me change my mind about some of rock's most fabled bands.  I came to realize, for example, that Yes's reputation for greatness is based largely on select tracks from their Fragile and Close To the Edge albums from the early seventies, but when you dig deeper into their catalog, you come to realize why cuts from Going For the One or Drama are not staples of classic-rock radio.  I had to wrestle with my opinions of  Billy Joel's work when he and Owen O'Donnell explained how his best music was "smooth, Tin Pan Alley-derived pop," while his few genuine rock cuts were "too derivative to be taken seriously."  But Joel, whom the pair labelled as the worst rock and roller ever, did create some genuine rock tracks when he wasn't trying consciously to rock out; however forced "You May Be Right" and "A Matter of Trust" are, "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Only The Good Die Young" were still rock and roll in the former's carefree execution and the latter's subversiveness.  No, Billy Joel isn't a rocker in the tradition of Chuck Berry or his (Joel's) friend Bruce Springsteen, but he is a rock and roll performer in the singer-songwriter tradition, and there were times when he came across as an East Coast Randy Newman.  Everything Jimmy wrote about artists he disliked challenged my own fondness for them, though he could never convince me that Paul Simon or the Grateful Dead were anything less than brilliant.   

Jimmy's greatest gift to me may have been the nerve to start up my blog.  When he moved his message board to this platform, I started the very blog you are reading now, and it followed the lead of Jimmy's own blog, "Quantity Over Quality" (which he accidentally named "Quantity Over Quantity" when he set it up, so he kept it).  This led to his second act; having long since stopped writing about rock and roll for a living as a critic for Rolling Stone, he moved on to writing about technology and video gaming, fascinated by the many possibilities that the Internet was offering.   He probably would have been skeptical, though, about the beautiful-women picture blog I started back in 2006, as there are so many fashion models on it; I recall that he didn't like models very much.  (He and Owen once joked that the original members of Duran Duran, a group the three of us despised, "married models, no doubt for the conversation," a remark I thought was unfair toward the models - especially Danish model Renée Simonsen, who was engaged to Duran Duran's bass player but dumped him because he was a shallow clothes horse and she was an avid reader who got a psychology degree after she quit modeling.)

I'll always remember Jimmy for his commitment to gay rights before supporting gay rights was cool, his fascination with hybrid-engine technology (he owned a hybrid Honda), and his love for Springsteen, as he was originally from the same part of New Jersey that I am from and still live in . . . though I did confess to him that I actually like Michigan's Bob Seger better.  Because of Jimmy's Garden State roots, I can't understand why I didn't hear of his death when it actually happened.  I'm still shocked at hearing about it now.  It turns out that at the time of his death, I was blogging about the Olympics and the presidential campaign, and the following weekend, I posted a record review, a review of Billy Joel's The Nylon Curtain.  Jimmy and Owen called that album "erratic," and I pretty much agreed with them, though I probably cut Joel a little more slack.

Jimmy would have loved that.    

RIP. 😢 

Ay, Calypso

My father was not socially conscious.  He was a pretty straight guy.  He was hardly what anyone would call "cool," having grown up in the fifties virtually oblivious to rock and roll.  Having been strictly raised Catholic in the days before the Second Vatican Council, he must have found Chuck Berry completely alien.  But he was a huge fan of one performer who, while not a rock and roller, was, as the son of Caribbean immigrants who incorporated calypso and rhythm and blues into his music and whose acting ability and good looks made him one of the first major black stars in Hollywood, was hip by definition.  My father was a huge fan of Harry Belafonte.

My father had pretty much every album from Belafonte, who died this week at 96, made in the late fifties and early sixties and he incessantly played them well into the late seventies, the records still without a scratch in them.  Belafonte was a truly impressive and energetic singer, and he was a classy showman.  But for all the good taste in music my father developed when he went to St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, he only appreciated the musical aspects of Belafonte's career and not the social ones.  My father was mostly an Eisenhower Republican who couldn't make heads or tails out of the civil rights movement or the counterculture, and do he did not share Belafonte's politics or social activism.  Belafonte was always there like Tom Joad, marching for civil rights in Washington, speaking out against the Vietnam War, featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as a guest host for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" (mere months before their assassinations), and appearing on the Smothers Brothers' variety show to sing "Don't Stop the Carnival" ot images of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago (the meaning of the juxtaposition of which was clear enough to get it cut from the broadcast, though it would be shown decades later).  Belafonte didn't just sing, like his contemporaries did.  Belafonte had something to say.

Belafonte would continue his activism well into the turn to the right in this country, supporting anti-apartheid measures against South Africa and spearheading famine relief for Ethiopia.  (Although Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson get the credit for USA For Africa by writing "We Are the World," they just wtoe the song; it was Belafonte who organized  that united support of artists.) And he was one of the first people to brand George Walker Bush a terrorist for starting a war in Iraq at a time when most people supported that military misadventure.  Even in his later years he was ahead of his time.  The same held true for popular culture; he co-produced the 1984 hip-hop movie Beat Street at a time when Culture Club and Duran Duran dominated the pop charts and the biggest movies of the year included Ghostbusters.  He never stopped speaking out for what was right and promoting what was important to him, and he carried that social and political conscience right up to the end of his life.

Harry Belafonte - singer, actor, humanitarian, political activist . . . 

. . . and also a cat lover.

RIP.

What the World Needs Now Is . . .

 . . . someone like Burt Bacharach.

I don't think I can say anything about Burt Bacharach, who died last week at the age of 94, that hasn't been already said.  His work speaks for itself - nearly a dozen hit songs from movies, his intricate time signatures, his dark, moody melodies, his long and successful collaboration with lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick (many of her Bacharach-David hits were also hits for Cilla Black in Britain and for Aretha Franklin in the U.S.), and numerous post-David collaborations with everyone from Carole Bayer Sager (to whom he was married for nine years) to Christopher Cross to Elvis Costello.    

Oh, and a Broadway musical, Promises Promises, based on Billy Wilder's 1960 movie The Apartment.

Bacharach was such a masterful composer, spanning decades and musical genres and particularly helping to define the sixties with Hal David - together, the greatest songwriting duo of the 1960s whose names aren't John Lennon and Paul McCartney - with their mod parlor sound (and sixties recordings of their songs always seem to have a trumpet solo).  Bacharach continued working well into his nineties and wrote enough music into the 2020s to cast a long shadow over popular music . . . the current emptiness and vacuity of which scream for another composer like Bacharach today.   

Below is my favorite recording of a Bacharach-David song, and it's not from Dionne Warwick.  Rather, it's from Herb Alpert, a recording of "This Guy's In Love With You" that topped the Billboard singles chart in America for four weeks in June and July of 1968 - Bacharach and David's first chart-topping single in their home country.

RIP. 

Long Time Gone

I've commented a lot about David Crosby, who died this past week at 81, on this blog, and despite my occasional criticism of some of the things he's said and done, I've probably been fairer to him his detractors (and you know he had a lot of them) have been.

Crosby could be mean and vindictive, as his fallouts with Graham Nash and Neil Young proved, but if you caught him on a good day, he could be the nicest man you'd ever met.  His brutal honesty was his biggest asset, like when he dismissed the idea of Kanye West as a genius musician (the world has since discovered that he's neither), but it could also be his biggest liability, as we discovered when he played art critic and dissed a fan who painted a picture of Crosby as a token of his esteem.  

Inevitably, we have to judge Crosby's legacy by his music, and when you look at his inventive guitar tuning, his masterful singing and harmonizing, he looks pretty good.  And while Nash, Young and Stephen Stills were better and more consistent songwriters than Crosby was, songs such as "Guinnevere," "Long Time Gone," "Laughing," "Page 43," "Bittersweet" and "Shadow Captain" proved that he was hardly a bad songwriter; in fact, the Crosby songs I just mentioned are among the greatest in the Crosby, Stills and Nash and Crosby/Nash canons.

In his final years, Crosby was more comfortable with himself as a musician, and he knew exactly how he wanted to spend the last days of his life - with family, music and love.  I'm only sorry that he was unable to reach a rapprochement with his former groupmates in CSNY while he was alive.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young had a magic quality to them, and the silencing of Crosby only reminds us that such magic will never come this way again.  RIP.    

Beck-Ola

Whether a member of the Yardbirds or a leader of a group, British guitarist Jeff Beck, who died last week at 78, was content to let vocalists take front and center stage.  But whether is was Keith Relf, Rod Stewart or Bob Tench singing out front, Beck's guitar was the star of the show.

 

Beck, along with fellow Yardbirds alumni Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, was one of what Creem magazine once dubbed the Unholy Three - the trio of British  guitarists that redefined rock and roll by taking it out of the realm of pop and taking into heavier territory.  But while Clapton remained a purist and Page turned amplified blues chords into heavy metal, Beck pursued the free-form, blues-based experimentalism commonly associated with Jimi Hendrix.  From the beginning, when he played the solo on the Yardbirds' recording of "Heart Full of Soul" (written by Graham Gouldman), he was driven to be innovative; he developed a sound on his guitar that emulated the Indian sitar and was like an accompanying voice for Keith Relf.   His pioneering work on the debut album of the first Jeff Beck Group, which featured Rod Stewart on vocals, created an array of sounds full of reverberation and feedback that set the template for blues-based rock that many thought Jimmy Page merely replicated on the first Led Zeppelin album.   

As a solo artist, Beck would occasionally bring in a singer but he mainly recorded instrumentals, preferring to let his guitar do the talking.  Beck already knew to make his guitar speak, and the sounds he emanated from it yielded memorable tracks.  At a time when guitar heroes are becoming harder to find in a pop world that has turned its back on guitar rock, it's worth revisiting Beck's vast catalog and (re)discover and appreciate what made him so great.  RIP. 😢 

Songbird

Christine McVie, who died last week at 79, was possibly the most underappreciated of the three singer-songwriters who fronted Fleetwood Mac from 1975 to 1987 (and again, sporadically, thereafter).  Neither a sex symbol like Stevie Nicks nor an offbeat experimentalist like Lindsey Buckingham, McVie provided the solid, conventional basis for Fleetwood Mac's more soulful ballads and light rockers with her accomplished keyboard playing, as well as some of the warmest, most tender songs in seventies and eighties rock that featured her distinctive, R&B-based vocal style.      

When Christine McVie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1971, she had already gained a reputation for being a fine blue-eyed-soul singer in the blues-rock band Chicken Shack.  Her talents were evident almost as soon as she joined Fleetwood Mac, named for the rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and Christine's husband, bassist John McVie.  Early songs such as "Spare Me a Little of Your Love" revealed a sense of intimacy in Christine's writing, and her comforting singing style was in sharp contrast to the more haunting vocals of her then-bandmate Bob Welch.  While she could be self-assured in songs like "You Make Lovin' Fun," she was just as adept at display her vulnerable side in songs such as "Say You Love Me," "Songbird," and "Hold Me," providing a respite from the musical dialogue between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.    

Ironically, her most assertive song ended up being used as a balm for supporters of politicians promising a better future.   Christine divorced John McVie as the band began recording 1977's Rumours LP, and her determination to get through the misery of a marital split inspired "Don't Stop."  It's a song about hope for the future, yes, but it also acknowledges the unfairness of a bitter past - she's pretty much saying that you can't have rainbows with the rain.  But beginning with Bill Clinton in 1992, just about every politician in the 1990s used "Don't Stop" to offer an agenda with nothing but rainbows, with a few unicorns thrown in for good measure.  "Don't Stop" proved that Christine McVie could be a tough cookie as well as a sweetheart, and her complex personality - which she channeled into her music - sustained her to the very end.  RIP.  

Remembering Rachel Hennelly

It was in the summer of 1991 when I first saw Rachel Hennelly perform, at the New York Renaissance Festival (now called the Renaissance Faire) in the town of Tuxedo in upstate New York.  She juggled bowling pins and gaily mugged for children as she strolled the grounds.  I generally found the Renaissance Festival less than satisfying, but I remember how much I liked Rachel.  I went back to the fair the following summer just to see her.  

This time Rachel was juggling swords and plates, standing in the middle of a field while an adoring audience that included yours truly watched, completely captivated by her charm . . . and her humor.  As she prepared to throw a sword in the air, she told the audience not to try such a stunt . . . unless they had insurance. 😀

Over the years, Rachel would reappear in my travels.  She'd be mentioned in a theater review for her acting  performances.  She'd perform at the Meadowlands Fair in New Jersey.  I'd see her juggle again in Central Park in New York, and then I'd see her perform a marionette act; the string puppets she used were her own creations.  I even got to meet her once, which I documented once in a post on this blog from August 2003.  She was a beautiful woman and a beautiful person.  People wanted to be around her when she performed her magic with hoops and swords or with marionettes, and they wanted to be around her when she was not performing.

Rachel Hennelly died on October 20, 2022, at the age of 62.  She had been battling cancer for two years and had already beaten the odds for having lasted that long, but while being moved from a hospital to a rehabilitation center, she contracted COVID and her fight was soon over.  Her brother Robert Hennelly, an esteemed journalist, wrote a warm tribute to her on the NJ Insider Web site, and it is required reading for anyone who has ever lost a family member and had to deal with grief.  

It was Robert Hennelly who made me aware of her sister's death.  He mentioned me on Twitter after having found my August 2003 blog post when he searched her name online and expressed his appreciation for my 19-year-old comments - but he did not say what prompted him to find and read my blog post.  I was thus prompted to search her name online myself, which I did . . . and when I found out she had died, I felt like I'd had the wind knocked out of me.

She was thirty-one years old when I first saw her.  Neither one of us could have known that her life - a life full of energy and vitality - was already half over. 😟

I only knew Rachel as a fan, and I could never feel her loss as much as her siblings do, but my appreciation of her multiple talents made me feel love for her and joy for her efforts to help make the world a better place.  Anyone who had the good fortune to watch her dance, juggle, or put on a marionette show felt the same love for her that she gave to her audiences.  There are very few performing artists who inspire so much love and can reciprocate it in kind, and Rachel Hennelly was certainly one of them.

Which is why those of us loved her art and loved her feel so sad now.

I stopped seeing Rachel in my travels after awhile.  I went to the area of Central Park where I had once seen her marionette act, hoping to catch her show again, but other street performers had taken up that space.  I still thought about her from time to time.   The night I was informed of her death, I  went to bed feeling numb.  As I lied there, I wanted to cry. 😢

For those who missed Rachel's performances, her brother Chris uploaded this video of her as the "Artful Juggler" on YouTube.  Please watch it.         

   

Our Beloved Auntie

Angela Lansbury, who would have been 97 yesterday but died least week, was everyone's aunt, thanks to not only her role in the 1966 musical Mame but also for her roles in films like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a Disney film about witches in England, and her long running series "Murder, She Wrote," in which, as murder mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher, solved cases by looking at the most subtle clues.  Her versatility allowed her to play heroines and villainesses, but she was always more entertaining as the heroine.

She acted, she sang, and she did both perfectly.  Having worked for eight decades, Ms. Lansbury was always able to attract new generations of fans.  Bet you didn't know that Generation Xers - those of us who suffered through the seventies as latchkey kids and suffered through the eighties by not having a real rock and roll band of our own - watched "Murder, She Wrote" as much as the older generations, if not more so - Ms. Lansbury said she received more fan mail from young people for that series than from anyone else.  In a word, there was nothing she couldn't do.       

Ms. Lansbury lived a long life, but that doesn't make us feel any less sad about her passing.  I'm sorry she couldn't make it to her ninety-seventh birthday, at least.  But at least we have all of the movies, such as National Velvet and  The Manchurian Candidate, as well as twelve years' worth of  "Murder, She Wrote" reruns.  RIP. 

Accession

The Queen is dead!

Long . . . live . . . the King.

Man Of History

David McCullough, who died recently at the age of 89, was one of America's most passionate and patriotic historians.  In addition to his books about the Brooklyn Bridge and the Wright Brothers, he wrote definitive biographies of some of this country's greatest leaders.

His biography of Harry Truman made it clear that Truman was not the simple, gray-matter politician with absolutist views and plain old horse sense that many people remember him to be.  McCullough showed how complicated Truman was, and also how his peers greatly respected him; part of the reason Truman was nominated for Vice President in 1944 was because Democratic leaders knew President Roosevelt would not live through a fourth term in the White House and they wanted someone the could trust to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. 

Similarly, McCullough sought to make it clear that John Adams was an acerbic country lawyer, not a Boston blueblood in the matter of future Boston Brahmins such as the Holmeses and the Lodges.  McCullough explained that Adams was in fact a brilliant legal thinker who contributed much to the founding of the United States and always held a grudge that his role in the Revolution was overshadowed by Washington, whom he greatly admired, and Benjamin Franklin, whom he disliked intensely.  Adams, ever the critic of the king of England, was nonetheless appointed as minister to Great Britain, a post brilliantly handled not just by himself but by his son and grandson.  Yet McCullough also showed how Adams made a name for himself as a lawyer, defending the British soldiers on trial for murder as a result of the Boston Massacre showing that, despite a strong desire for a rush to judgment, even the hated British soldiers deserved a fair trial.  

McCullough held history sacred, so much that he was one of many historians who publicly denounced - and helped stop - a Disney historical theme park that the Disney company had planned for Virginia near Civil War battlefields.  As an historian of great integrity, he will be very much missed.  RIP.    

On The Mark

For the longest time, I always expected sharp, clever insight from Mark Shields, who died last week at the age of 85, on the PBS NewsHour on Fridays when he and one of the many partners he had - first David Gergen, then Paul Gigot, and finally David Brooks - reviewed the week in politics.  Shields, an unpretentious Irish-American columnist who had honed his skills of political analysis from having worked in the trenches of Democratic politics (he worked for Bobby Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign), was always ready with a trenchant observation and a perfect understanding of the ways of Washington.

What made Shields a perfect political analyst was his plain speaking as well as his experience with politics.  He treated people the way he wanted to be treated - with respect - and he never talked down to anyone.  A native of Massachusetts, Shields was someone who lived inside the Capital Beltway but always knew what people inside Route 128 (the freeway that goes around Boston) were thinking and feeling.  He conveyed that Middle American sensibility on both PBS and, back in the 1990s, on CNN.  If there was any decency left in Washington, it's because of Mark Shields.

Mark Shields retired in 2020 after 33 years on public television, and made his exit at the right time, going out on top.  He knew when to quit.  In 1982, he ended his talk radio show because, as he aid, he had nothing left to say.  And I'm going to stop here in waxing rhapsodic about Mark Shields, because I have nothing left to say, either. RIP.