American Wolf

The Top 5 Rock Songs About Presidents

2012-02-20T20:54:00.003-05:00

To celebrate President’s Day this year, I thought it would be nice to do a little countdown of the greatest rock and roll songs about presidents.

I think the list speaks for itself, although I would like to make one honorable mention: The Showcase Showdown’s “Millard Fillmore, Last of the Whigs,” which was omitted because it was only ever available as a super-obscure indie 7” vinyl. And it lasts about a minute. And its words are mostly just the title repeated. But there’s something beautiful there, y’know? But I digress...

Okay, here’s the list, minus the Millard.

5. “He Was a Friend of Mine” by the Byrds (1965)

One of the earliest examples I’m aware of a rock and roll song dealing directly with a contemporary president, “He Was a Friend of Mine” appeared on the Byrds’ second album as a tribute to John F. Kennedy. Like so many early Byrds songs, the song came from Dylan, who used to sing it about Woody Guthrie. Although Dylan claimed to have written it himself, the song was found on an old record of prison recordings from which Dylan apparently lifted it; he then just changed around the words to relate to Woody Guthrie instead of a fellow inmate. The Byrds in turn pulled the same trick on Dylan, continuing the chain from an African American prisoner to a dustbowl refugee to a Catholic president (and if that’s not a statement about the breadth of America, I’ll never know it). The Byrds took Dylan’s sparse folk-picking arrangement and overhauled it, flattening its lopsided rhythm in favor of a rock and roll dirge in 4/4 time, with the group’s signature 12-string guitar and multi-layered harmonies filling the sound. Heard today, it’s a weird forbearer of the socially-conscious songs that would soon flood the rock scene, with the opening verse lamenting that “His killing had no purpose, no reason, or rhyme.” It wasn’t subtle, but hey, the ’60s stuff rarely was.

4. “James K. Polk” by They Might Be Giants (1996)

There are two main types of presidential songs: Ones that are more general and subtle, and ones that are specific and hit you over the head with it. Perhaps the best example of the latter is “James K. Polk” by They Might Be Giants, those catchy-tune mavericks of the geeky vocal dexterity. In a post-alternative, post-ironic, and, perhaps most importantly, post-Schoolhouse Rocks era, leave it to They Might Be Giants to enshrine the person often cited as The Greatest President That You’ve Never Heard Of. And this song gives you a good overview on why: “He seized the whole southwest from Mexico/Made sure the tariffs fell/And made the English sell the Oregon territory/He built an independent treasury.” All of which was true. And, in a move that would seem almost unthinkable today: “Having done all this, he sought no second term.” Exhibiting humble restraint in the presidential arena? Why, that sounds even weirder than a They Might Be Giants song.

3. “Christ for President” by Billy Bragg and Wilco (1998)

Taken from a project in which a British protest singer and an American alt-country band teamed up to flesh out unfinished Woody Guthrie songs, “Christ for President” was one of the Wilco songs, with the group setting Guthrie’s words to a country stomp. Like so many great Woody Guthrie songs, its success lies in its simplicity. Guthrie was a master at taking a complicated situation and presenting it in a way that made sense and stuck in your head (this ability was one of the key things that a young Dylan picked up from listening to Guthrie). “Christ for President” tears down any lingering notions about a separation of church and state, although from John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon in 1630 on down through Ronald Reagan’s invoking of Winthrop’s sermon 250 years later, any separation in the American identity was always tentative at best. Guthrie was clearly having fun with the words and Wilco’s music reflects that, as they freely mix scripture, politics, and irony. “The only way we could ever beat those crooked politician men,” they sing at one point, “Is to run the money changers out of the temple [and] put the Carpenter in.” Here, here – you got my vote.

2. “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” by Gene Marshall (c. 1976)

In the 1970s, before people had access to better recording equipment on their iPhone than the Beatles ever had in the studio, there was the “song-poem” industry, in which you could send a poem and a set amount of money to a small recording studio and get back a record containing your poem as a finished song. Given how weird things can get when such variables are mixed (the general public, poets, musicians, and the 1970s), the song-poem industry was rediscovered by hipsters in the early ’00s and celebrated it as an outsider art. One of the songs that became the most well-known was the ridiculously wonderful “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” by Gene Marshall. It seems that someone lifted passages from Jimmy Carter’s early campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and mailed it in to be set to music. The song-poem company who received it turned it into a funky groove: “Can our government be competent?/Jimmy Carter says yes, Jimmy Carter says yes/Can our government be honest?/Jimmy Carter says yes, Jimmy Carter says yes…” before clearing way for the singer to recite one part of an early Carter speech, which also was apparently sent in as part of the “poem.” Like the best song-poem music, it’s impossible to gage where the irony begins and the sincerity ends: Did the person who sent in the poem love Carter or do it as a joke? And does the band’s performance of the song further enhance or mask such intentions? If it is a joke, who is it a joke on? The person who wrote it? The people who made it into a song? The president? Maybe it the whole thing was done by Billy Carter on a drunken dare. We’ll probably never know, but that’s part of what makes it so fascinating.

1. “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” by Randy Newman (1974)

Written in the same year as Watergate, included on an album that reaches back at least as far as the Coolidge administration, and based on a sentiment that could be about any current president, Randy Newman’s “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” is the greatest rock and roll song about presidents. As a nation built upon capitalism, the economy has always been a central concern in America, from the cyclical “panics” of the 1800s to the Great Depression of the 1900s to the Great Recession of the 2000s. Pick any day in American history, and chances are there’s someone somewhere feeling the pinch and making up their mind to sit down and write the president about it. It’s a reflection of fine line the president is supposed to walk: Down-to-earth enough to understand the issues of the working man, but lofty enough to command the respect needed to run the country. With all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the presidency, it’s the down-to-earth side that often gets neglected. This is what “Mr. President” is all about, and with Randy Newman writing and performing it, he pulls no punches. Built it around a bluesy swagger, the song states its problem simply (“We’ve taken all you given/But it’s gettin’ hard to make a livin’ ”), expects no mercy (“We’re not asking you to love us/You may place yourself high above us”), and cuts no slack (“Maybe you’ve cheated, maybe you’ve lied/Maybe you have finally lost your mind/Maybe you’re only thinking ’bout yourself”). It is not so much a lament or a protest as it is a reminder of the bond between the President and Common Man that transcends all boundaries of partisanship and politics: Namely, that every American has a right, if not a duty, to be able to walk up to the president, speak their mind, and have the president listen to them. Any president who cannot make the effort to do so is not worthy of the people they serve.

Last Thoughts on Whitney Houston, 1963-2012.

2012-02-11T23:36:00.004-05:00

When I worked at Borders, it used to be easy enough to find the pop artists: If they were white, they were in Pop/Rock and if they were African-American, they were in Soul/R&B. Yes, yes, the handful African-American rockers were in Pop/Rock – Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Little Richard – but very few others; even Sly & the Family Stone, who I’ve always thought of as a rock group rather than a soul group, were kept under Soul/R&B. And that’s the way it was always organized, aside from two major exceptions.

One exception was Michael Jackson. The other was Whitney Houston.

Now both of them, like the store that deemed them Pop/Rock, are gone. Both lived about a half-century, had a career of record-breaking success followed by a long spell in the wilderness, and died suddenly, with rumors of drug abuse.

With Michael Jackson, it was interesting because although nobody wanted to claim him for the 20 years or so before he died, everyone became an instant fan, not unlike how, once the New England Patriots got a decent coach and team, you couldn’t find someone who didn’t claim to have “always loved the Patriots,” even when they were the laughing-stock of Boston sports. Well, let me tell you, I lived in Boston in the 1980s, and nobody liked the Patriots. Not a single person. Let alone scores of them who now crowd the downtown bars and say they “always” had.

Same thing with Michael Jackson. When he died, everyone acted like it was 1985 and nothing had broken his success. This happened because Michael Jackson was one of those few performers – really, the only other ones being Elvis and the Beatles (although we’ll have to wait and see on Madonna, perhaps) – who was so big initially, it somehow all made sense when it snapped back in place with his death. I have a book about the Beatles with a quote that says something like, “Once you go up, you go down. Except for the Beatles. They could never really get down.” The next page then talks about “The Magical Mystery Tour.” Well, same thing with Michael Jackson. When you’re so huge and famous, you can’t ever really get down.

But Whitney Houston is a little more of an anomaly. She was so, so big, but then she totally disappeared in what was (at least to someone who was essentially a non-fan) a haze of drugs, confusion, and Bobby Brown. Unlike Michael Jackson (and, I would imagine, what it was like for periods of Elvis’s career), she wasn’t always just there. I remember looking at her tag in the Pop/Rock section in the early-’00s at Borders and thinking “Huh,” as though it was a relic from a lost era, like say, 1992.

That was the year that Whitney (and she was at that one-name level of fame, like Michael, Madonna, Liz, or, ick, Kim?) was at her peak, when “I Will Always Love You” became the biggest hit ever in the history of recorded humanity and even back before they knew how to write. You could not escape that song. MTV and VH1 had it on all the time. Radios played it instead of commercials. Stores that didn’t even sell music had the single (remember singles?!) in cashier lines. Uncreative popular girls used it at the end of stupid sketches for class or some assignment where you have to use a song to help tell a story, or something. And then of course there was that guy in England who successfully sued a lady for being a public nuisance when she played the song repeatedly at full blast.

Well, after living through the song’s reign (as a 12-year-old adolescent, nonetheless), I felt like we should all be able to issue public nuisance violations because the song was at full blast everywhere. It won all those Grammys. In fact, it single-handedly made me lose all faith in the Grammys (as a 13-year-old adolescent, nonetheless) when The Bodyguard Soundtrack beat out R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People for Best Album.

One good thing that came out of the Bodyguard-era of Whitney Houston’s career is that it made me appreciate how good her earlier music was. That first solo record, which became something like the best-selling solo record since the invention of solo performers and maybe even a few cave-eras before that, had “How Will I Know,” and other ’80s pop gems I had never fully appreciated; music that was at least as good as Madonna’s “Borderline” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” which is pretty damn good.

But somewhere in the mid-’90s we lose the trail, and Whitney Houston sort of vanishes. She doesn’t make any of those Rolling Stone 500 lists and she is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She tried to make that comeback record a few years ago, but the only reason I remember is because there was a huge poster of it that I saw every time I went into J&R Records in downtown Manhattan to buy more of those 2009 Beatles remasters. She was something rare in the pop world: A living-legend who was omnipresent, but then turned into a phantom as though she had never been there.

So I’m going to get up and go to work tomorrow and try to dig out all of the Whitney Houston product I can, just like I did for Etta James, just like I did for Amy Winehouse, and just like I did for Michael Jackson, not because I’m an unsentimental capitalist bastard but because I know that everyone is going to come in looking for it and it’s simply easier to reach in front of you to get something than it is to keep walking across the room.

And I know where I’ll find it, too. Barnes & Noble keeps her in the Soul department.

Only Michael Jackson is in Pop/Rock.

The 3 Biggest Myths About the Oscars

2012-02-06T17:09:00.004-05:00

It’s the Oscar season again the movie industry is getting swept up in its fever. And why shouldn’t they? There is a mystique about the Oscar that has always put it ahead of the Emmy and the Grammy, in part because it is older, but also in part because the idea of the movies is bigger than the idea of television or record albums.

Because of this, the Oscars seem to get a free pass in collective memory as people just assume that its reputation is borne out by its record. But is it?

In this spirit, I would like to submit three of the biggest myths about the Oscars.

1. Best Picture always goes to a classic. Luckily, for the Academy, they have gotten it right enough times to create the illusion of the Best Picture winners being a definitive shortlist for the canon of film: Casablanca (1943), Gone with the Wind (1939), and The Godfather (1972) have all won the prestigious award. But there are several problems. First of all, there are some simply bad films that have won Best Picture. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) is generally considered the worst (and it beat out High Noon to get it, much to the chagrin of every critic ever), but not that far behind it are The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and (for many, myself included) Crash (2005). Cavalcade (1932/33) is so bad, it’s never been readily available on DVD, not that anyone seems to notice. Which calls to mind all of the Best Picture winners that leave no real mark in the collective memory, such as The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Marty (1955) Tom Jones (1963), and Ordinary People (1980), which are the Best Picture equivalent of Millard Fillmore. Finally, there are the films that are good-to-great but beat out bigger/better classics to get there. The most infamous example of this is How Green Was My Valley (1941), which beat out Citizen Kane, which is generally considered the greatest film of all-time, ever. I’m told that Valley is actually pretty decent, but I’ll never know because I’ll never watch it out of principle.

2. Great actors are always rewarded for their signature roles. Once again, the Academy has gotten it right enough times for people to assume this is true: Gregory Peck won for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Bette Davis won for All About Eve (1950), Tom Hanks won for Forrest Gump (1994), and Clark Gable won for…It Happened One Night (1934). Gable actually lost the Best Actor award for Gone With the Wind (1939) to Robert Dunat, who won for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Another person Dunat beat that year was Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which upset so many people that Stewart was given one of the first “consolation” Oscars the following year for Best Actor in The Philadelphia Story (1940), a film in which he received third billing. Stewart’s 1940 Best Actor win meant that he beat out Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath (Fonda got his own consolation Oscar over 40 years later for On Golden Pond). To round out the list, Humphrey Bogart won for The African Queen (1950), not Casablanca (1943); Audrey Hepburn won for Roman Holiday (1953), not Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field (1963), not In the Heat of the Night (1967); and John Wayne won for the original True Grit (1969), not The Searchers (1956), in part because The Searchers received no Academy Award nominations, period. But that’s a whole other list…

3. The Oscars always reward the best of the best. Sometimes the Academy Awards get things right. But for every other time, there’s always an honorary Oscar award. Cases in point: Alfred Hitchcock, generally considered the greatest director ever, never won a competitive Oscar, but was given an honorary one in 1968. Cary Grant, often considered the greatest actor ever, also never won a competitive Oscar, but was given an honorary one in 1970. And, as noted above, Citizen Kane, generally considered the greatest film ever, did not win Best Picture; any time you see print for it proclaiming it an “Oscar winner,” follow the fine print down to the bottom where you can see Orson Welles won for Best Original Screenplay (his only competitive Oscar – he got his honorary one the same year as Cary Grant). Other honorary-only winners include Charlie Chaplin (1927/28 and 1971), Greta Garbo (1954), Fred Astaire (1950), and Groucho Marx (1973). Judy Garland and Shirley Temple were both only given a now-defunct special “juvenile” award (a somewhat degrading pint-sized Oscar) for their work in 1940 and 1934, respectively. James Dean was nominated twice (posthumously) and lost both. Which leaves us with Marilyn Monroe, arguably the most iconic movie star of all-time, who was neither given nor even nominated for an Academy Award. Many believe she should have been nominated for Some Like It Hot, which many consider to be the greatest comedy ever, and features Monroe’s finest performance. Instead, the Oscar that year went to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top. Whom I’m sure we all remember just as well.

The Kinks’ “Village Green”: An Appreciation

2012-01-30T19:06:00.004-05:00

Is there any song that has more going on in a shorter length of time than the Kinks’ “Village Green”? Clocking in at a mere 2:09 on the Kinks’ celebrated 1968 album, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, “Village Green” provides a sweeping vista of British culture that equals, if not surpasses, the other 37-or-so minutes that surround it. As a record, the only thing that touches it is Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ 1960 “Stay [Just a Little Bit Longer],” which, at 1:37, remains the shortest number-one pop single ever. Only where “Stay” feels longer because of all of the different musical things it contains (all of which are cleverly enhanced by the lyrics), “Village Green” feels longer because of the scope of its vision; thus, where “Stay” belies its brevity with the illusion of length, “Village Green” belies its brevity with the depth of its story.

“Village Green” can best be described as an epic (albeit a very, very short epic), following in the grand tradition of Homer’s Odyssey on down through Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane: It begins in the present, flashes back to the past to tell its tale, and brings the story back up to the present in which it began. Doing so is no small feat. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is, as the title suggests, an album celebrating the preservation of time and memory, the act of growing wistful for an England that is long gone – if it ever, as has often been pointed out, even existed in the first place. What gives “Village Green” its power is that it goes farther than any other song on the album, reaching back into the past and pulling it into the present, placing them side-by-side until the two become one.

It also helps that the song’s music is as distinctive as its tale. Taken strictly as a sound, “Village Green” doesn’t really sound like anything else on the album, let alone in the Kinks’ catalogue. The harpsichord churns with a thick sea of stringed instruments and culminates in a slithering clarinet figure can only be described as gothic, a Victorian Age ghost story with the production values of the Jaynettes’ bizarrely ominous 1963 hit, “Sally, Go ’Round the Roses.”

The lyrics are among the most nostalgic Ray Davies ever wrote (which is to say, among the most nostalgic in rock and roll) – winding prepositional phrases capturing a lost era of country glens and rolling hills, which have long since been sacrificed to the steel jaws of industry and the empty profits of tourism. The singer’s words are simple yet dramatic. They take us out into the country, away from the soot and noise of the city, and into the church with the steeple that sits in the village green. Once upon a time, the singer knew a girl named Daisy, who he kissed by the old oak tree. “Although I love my Daisy,” he sings, “I sought fame, and so I left the village green.”

This is the most telling line of the entire song – in order to seek fame, the singer must leave the village green; the two notions are by definition mutually exclusive entities. They also set up the chief emotion that drives the song (and, in turn, the entire album): A bittersweet sense of longing. The singer expresses this in the song’s beautiful stream-of-conscious bridge:

I miss the village green, and all the simple people

I miss the village green, the church the clock the steeple

I miss morning dew, fresh air, and Sunday School...

But now the houses have become “rare antiquities” as the singer sneers with disgust at the American tourists who flood them, snap photos, and say, “Gawd darn it, isn’t it a pretty scene?” “And Daisy’s married Tom, the grocer’s boy,” he observes in phrases that feel modeled on the rhythms of ancient scripture, “And now he owns a grocery.”

The bridge kicks in a second time, this time accented by the plucking arpeggio of strings, which only makes the words sound that much more stately. All of the same elements scurry by – the simple people, the church and clock, the morning dew, fresh air, Sunday school – in a way that somehow elevates the mundane to the regal.

The song closes exactly where it should, with the singer deciding to return to the village green and see Daisy, as they drink tea and laugh while talking about the village green. “We will laugh,” the singer closes with a slight sense of gravity that counters the phrase, “and talk about the village green.”

Like so many great songs, there is a deceptive simplicity that asks more questions than it answers. For instance, did the singer ever achieve the fame he sought? Did Daisy know that he was returning? Does he still (or did he ever) love Daisy? Does she still (or did she ever) love him? And what about that ending: What exactly are they laughing and talking about (apparently in that order)? When taken in this light, the song is indeed like a British “Sally, Go ’Round the Roses.”

And yet, its closest parallel is a country song that came a decade before “Village Green” was released: Johnny Cash’s 1958 country song, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” It is perhaps Cash’s biggest early hit that is least familiar today, and it’s easy to hear why: After the timeless shuffle of songs like “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” is one of the most dated things that Johnny Cash ever recorded. Trying to broaden his signature “hillbilly” sound, the song featured a cloying barbershop quartet echoing the lyrics and subject matter about girls and fame that reached for Chuck Berry but hit closer to Pat Boone. (Modern tastes aside, the ploy did work: “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” was one of Cash’s biggest hits of the ’50s, hitting number one on the country charts and crossing over to 14 on the pop charts.)

The song is simple enough, telling of a small-town teenage queen who fell in love with the boy next door (who worked at the candy store), until one day a talent scout whisks her far away to Hollywood, where she finds fame, riches, and anything she could possibly ever want. Everything, of course, except the boy next door (who worked at the candy store). “Do I have to tell you more?” the singer asks at the end, “She came back to the boy next door.” And you guessed it, he still worked at the candy store.

Given the similarities between the two songs’ subject matter (boy and girl fall in love until one leaves on a quest for fame, only to return years later), length (Cash’s song is exactly one second shorter than the Kinks’ song), and title (think about it: “Village Green” and “Teenage Queen” – they’re only six letters apart), I can’t help but wonder if Ray Davies didn’t consciously model “Village Green” on “Teenage Queen.” The former is subtle where the latter is obvious, inventive where the latter is trite, and, most tellingly, British where the latter is American. Is it any wonder that the British song is quieter and more open-ended while the American song is brasher and with a happy ending?

If this is the case, Ray Davies took a line drawing and made it into an oil painting, layering music and lyric, love and loss, youth and adulthood, religion and faith, dreams and reality, and British culture and American rock and roll – a British reimagining of what America’s greatest president once termed “the mystic chords of memory.”

And Daisy’s married Tom, the grocer’s boy, and now he owns a grocery.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 6: The “Dinner Party” Question & The Elusive Third Chair

2012-01-24T19:47:00.006-05:00

Probably the most underutilized question in social interaction is the old “dinner party” question – that is, what three people, dead or alive, would you most like to have dinner with?

For me, I’ve had two-thirds of the answer down for quite some time now: Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Could you imagine sitting down to eat between these two men? On the left side you have Jefferson, the first Democratic president, red-headed and rigid, a taciturn and shy man who actively avoided the political stage only to serve in virtually every major governmental office, a man who owned slaves yet canonized the concept that all men are created equal; on the right side you have Lincoln, the first Republican president, dark-haired and lanky, limbs going every which way as he fills in the silences with country yarns and dirty jokes, a career politician who endlessly courted the political stage despite losing nearly every office he ran for, a man who proved that all men were created equal by freeing the slaves.

To call such a meal epic would be an understatement; with any luck, the discussion might unfold into a discourse about the values upon which the country was founded and the price of what those values turned out to be, the sins of the father atoned by the bloody actions of the son. It would be the two most unknowable and enigmatic men America has ever produced, sitting face-to-face and breaking bread.

But what to do about the elusive third chair? Who could go there? With my historical/cultural desires satiated by Jefferson and Lincoln, it seems like throwing a third American historical giant (Washington? Franklin? A Roosevelt?) in the mix would be too much. After all, even the Marx Brothers had Zeppo.

The third chair also allows me to get a bit of a “freebie,” a chance to take a risk on someone who might not fit in with my first two choices. There’s always the temptation to do a great-grandfather or some relative you always heard about but never knew, but I would feel weird having a mini-family reunion in the middle of what could be a fascinating political discourse. I also feel like the idea of choosing someone who’s a near-complete historical enigma – such as, say, the obscure blues singer Geeshie Wiley or the archetypal media mogul Johannes Gutenberg – could be a major risk, especially if that person turned out to be thoroughly uninteresting.

They say that Elvis was always a disappointment to meet in real life (I mean, how could any man live up to ELVIS, the idea?), so he’s out. Plus, it might be unnerving to Jefferson and Lincoln, who would have no frame of reference for this strange-looking person who might as well be a man from space. Also, I’d probably embarrass myself by spending too much time studying his hair or gazing into his eyes.

Shakespeare’s too much of a crapshoot, especially if you call into question the authorship of his plays. What if it turns out that the plays were in fact written by someone else? Would you want to share your epic dinner with a crooked theater owner who left his widow a “second-best bed” in his will? So foul and unfair a dinner-guest I have not seen. Shakepeare’s out.

I am also striking out all biblical figures because they could be potentially distracting. There’s too great a chance that both Jefferson and Lincoln would rather speak to this person rather than to each other; plus, they might be too overly guarded in terms of what they say in front of them. I mean, who wants to drop an F-bomb in front of Moses? Certainly not Abraham Lincoln.

I would also rule out figures like Genghis Khan or Cleopatra because of the language barrier. Joan of Arc is an exception, since she’s French, and Jefferson could translate. But once again, we run the risk of Jefferson and Lincoln being more interested in speaking to someone else rather than to each other; plus, I hate the idea of giving Jefferson an extra job. I mean, it’s not like there’ll be rails to split right by the dinner table.

All of which leaves me with one name: Will Rogers. Think about it – he comes after Jefferson and Lincoln, knows each of their contexts, and would be hilarious about it at the same time. If things got heated or awkward at any point, I could just turn to Will Rogers and get him to jump in with a quick look or a nod. He would basically be just another modern spectator, much like myself. Only about a thousand times funnier.

Now, who’s gonna pick up the check…?

Gimme Gimme Shlock Tweet-ment

2012-01-23T19:45:00.002-05:00

I realized that Twitter had jumped the shark when I went to get my driver’s license changed over after moving to Washington, D.C.

After you go and register at the front door of the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, you are handed a small ticket with a number on it, much like what you get while waiting for meat at a supermarket deli counter. It had a printed number and an arrow to help you to know to pull out (as opposed to push back in?) the ticket, as well as a small message written at the bottom. It read: “Follow us on Twitter @dcdmv.”

Such an idea seemed preposterous. I had a Twitter account where I followed several close friends, a few admired celebrities, and Britney Spears, for no apparent reason. All of which made sense, except for Britney Spears. But the DC DMV? Why would anyone want to follow that? But soon my feigned perplexity gave way to detached bemusement, as I stared down the invitation like an arrogant challenge. I thought to myself, “You know what? I will follow DC DMV on Twitter!” I got out my phone, signed up for their feed, and resolved to keep the ticket as a trinket of the absurdity of postwar American culture.

Only I wasn’t allowed to keep the ticket. It turns out that after they call you up to the registry counter, they take the ticket from you, presumably to prevent you hawking it in the parking lot for something more valuable than knockoff designer purses or bootleg movies: Jumping ahead in the DMV line. Thus, my already absurd assessment of the situation was rendered even more so: The Twitter message was not for you to crumple up in your pocket and carry around all day, but rather for the 7-to-75-minute wait between putting your name in at the door and going about your DMV business at the counter. This made little to no sense. Who would think to heed this message, assuming they had even happened to catch it in the first place, what while sorting out their one-to-three forms of state-issued identification, signed lease contract or further proof of residence, and letter from their second-grade teacher certifying their blood-type?

Well, me, apparently.

And, I’d like to add, exactly 700 others.

There are currently 701 people (I like to think of myself as the “and one”) following the DC DMV on Twitter – well over twice as many as it deems worthy to follow itself (253) – as lured in by the message at the bottom of a precious number ticket and choosing to stay at the prospect of a glamorous mission statement: “DC DMV is here to promote public safety. Tweet questions and follow us for service and program updates. We normally respond to tweets Mon-Fri from 8am – 5pm.”

As Twitter feeds go, the DC DMV is far from the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It tweets far more regularly than the official accounts of Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe Biden, and Thomas Jefferson (“from the good people at Monticello”) combined, and is often more informative than the countless obscure-to-quasi-famous musicians who post a never-ending stream of setlists and generic messages about being “in the studio.”

The DC DMV Twitter feed can perhaps best be described as competent – and about as exciting as a glass of milk. It tweets some sort of usually-obvious safety tip or not-so-fun fact every few hours (“If you don’t respond to a ticket by adjudicating it or playing the fine, it will be referred to a collections agency”) or gives you the second half of some question asked by somebody cool enough to think to message them publicly (“You’re welcome. Follow us and tell your friends to follow us too!”). As modern culture goes, posting a question to the DC DMV is only one step above writing a letter to one of those complimentary airline travel magazines that are located in the seat pocket in front of you.

But then again, what was I expecting? The whole thing makes me think of the New Yorker cartoon of the two hipper-than-thou hipster men speaking to each other as they walk through Brooklyn with their small babies. The caption reads: “What’s the right age to tell a child that she’s ironic?”

I think I was doing something similar in following the DC DMV Twitter feed: Holding on to something for the cheap thrill of basking in its irony.

All of which sounds well and good, but it turns out that waiting around for irony can get pretty boring.

But at least in the meantime, I won’t have to wonder how the District of Columbia’s traffic ticket amnesty program works.

The Top 5 Greatest Rock and Roll Sitcom Episodes

2012-01-10T13:49:00.002-05:00

Ever since April 10, 1957 – the day that Ricky Nelson picked up his guitar to sing “I’m Walking” on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet – rock and roll has been a fixture on the sitcom screen. But what have been the finest, most rockin’ episodes? After much extensive research and analysis, I have boiled them down to the top five.

As always, I had to set some guidelines. Many shows skirted fees and copyrights by creating fictionalized stars (such as teenage heartthrob Johnny Poke on The Beverly Hillbillies or Bobby Fleet and His Band with a Beat on The Andy Griffith Show). I also avoided guest shots on animated shows, since the rock stars didn’t actually appear. Hence no Beau Brummels (sorry, I mean the Beau Brummelstones) on The Flintstones and no Aerosmith (or Stones, Ramones, or ex-Beatles) on The Simpsons. Finally, I also kept a fairly strict definition of rock and roll (hence no B.B. King on Sandford and Son, since King’s more blues than rock) as well as a fairly strict definition of sitcom (hence no Alice Cooper on The Muppet Show, since that was essentially structured as a variety show with a featured guest host).

As for criteria, I just tried to meet the spirit (no pun intended, as you will see) of my list’s honorable mention, the Standells 1965 appearance on The Munsters, in which the group plays a ramshackle cover of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the Munsters’ beatnik party. While Herman declares the band almost as good as Kate Smith, little Eddie marvels at the rock and roll music.

Eddie: “Grampa, doesn’t that send you out of this world?”

Grampa: “So what, I’ve been there before.”

We should all be so lucky.

5. Spencer Davis, Richie Havens, Robby Krieger, Mark Lindsay, Peter Noone, and John Sebastian on Married…With Children, “Rock of Ages,” November 15, 1992.

“Hope I die before I get old” goes the eternal rock and roll rallying cry, but in the decades following Woodstock, it became increasingly clear that not everyone would get off that easy. Married…With Children, which centered around the rare baby boomer-era parents who never wallowed in their era’s nostalgia (as opposed to shows as diverse as Family Ties, ALF, Head of the Class, and The Fresh Prince of Bell-Air, all of which had at least one wistful boomer-driven hippie episode that usually consisted of Generation X stumbling upon some ’60s relics, learning about the era, and then using a good ol’ fashioned sit-in to save whatever thing was about to be demolished by greedy money-hungry yuppies); in hindsight, perhaps the Bundys were the living embodiment of the Age of Aquarius’ failures, but I digress. In this episode, the Bundys fake being a rock and roll band so that they can get on a first class flight with other rock and roll stars. Granted, some of these are stars in the loosest sense (would’ve Al Bundy really been able to recognize the Doors’ keyboardist at the drop of a hat?), but that’s the joke and everybody is gamely in on it. It’s all worth it to see their “We Are the World”-mocking finale “Old Aid” (sample lyric: “We are the old/We have arthritis/Our gums are weak/From gingivitis”) and, of course, Al Bundy doing that amazing sandwich solo.

4. Davy Jones on The Brady Bunch, “Getting Davy Jones,” December 10, 1971.

For kids like myself watching reruns of The Brady Bunch after school, the various dimensions of time and space converge in ways that create their own pockets of reality. Take, for instance, this classic episode in which Marsha claims she can get Davy Jones to perform at the prom before she even knows how to get in touch with him. Now, as a huge fan of the Monkees (their 20^th anniversary reruns in ’86 were the only MTV I was allowed to watch), I just took for granted that Davy was a superstar, as famous and fantastic as Marsha treated him in the episode. Little did I know that by the time this episode aired in 1971, The Monkees had been off the air for almost three years, and the Monkees – which was reduced to a duo after Peter and Mike left the band in 1968 and 1969, respectively – had ceased to exist in any form for over a year, and its members, including heartthrob Davy Jones, were now lingering on the brink of obscurity. Enter Marsha Brady. The Brady Bunch had always depicted a world in which fantasy trumped reality; hence, Davy Jones could be treated like the biggest star in the world and make Marsha Brady’s world by kissing her on the cheek. I can’t decide which is better – Marsha’s spying siblings mocking them by pretending to kiss each other (oddly foreshadowing the relationships they would have in real life amongst each other) or Davy Jones rehashing the whole thing in The Brady Bunch Movie in 1995, while Marsha once again swoons…along with the adult chaperones.

3. The Doobie Brothers on What’s Happening!!, “Doobie or Not Doobie, Part II,” February 4, 1978.

There are rock and roll television episodes where a group essentially shows up to play a song. And then there are episodes where a group hangs out and gets to do some awkward banter and/or relevant public service announcements (usually something about how school is good or drugs are bad), with little or no stage time shown in the program. And then there’s this, in which the Doobie Brothers pull off the rock and roll sitcom trifecta on What’s Happening!!, spending ample time performing, bantering, and teaching the gang an important moral lesson. The latter is what drives the episode, as Raj, Rerun, and Dwayne get conned into bootlegging the Doobies’ homecoming show at their high school, where the band also used to attend. The band closes with “Takin’ It to the Streets,” Rerun begins to jump up and down, and the rest is history. The 1978 “portable” tape recorder Rerun has been hiding in his overcoat falls out as everyone in the auditorium somehow falls instantly silent and the band points at him in disbelief. Cut to the backroom, where the Doobies are leveling with the What’s Happening!! gang about what a serious offense bootlegging is. Well, it just so happens the bootlegger who set the guys up is someone who has bootlegged the band before. And it just so happens that the guys are planning to meet him at the soda shop. And it also just so happens that the Doobie Brothers have apparently nothing else to do after a show than wait in the various doorways of said soda shop (thankfully, there are about 37 members in this band) and orchestrate a small sting operation to catch the crook. And the final gag? When they play back the tape, all that can be heard is Rerun eating popcorn! Well, at least that’s better than having to listen to Michael McDonald’s vocals.

2. The Beach Boys on Full House, “Beach Boy Bingo,” November 18, 1988.

I know what you’re thinking – which time that the Beach Boys were on Full House? (I mean, how cool did you feel when you noticed that John “Uncle Jesse” Stamos could be seen playing percussion in the background of their comeback video, “Kokomo”?) Well, even though the Beach Boys appeared on the show several times (albeit in different conglomerations), this is likely the episode you are thinking of; there’s just so much that happens, it seems like it must have been more. The plot is as simple as can be – DJ wins tickets to see the Beach Boys but can’t decide who to take as her plus one – but it yields countless memorable moments: Danny trying to sing the overlapping parts of “Good Vibrations” with an acoustic guitar on his morning talk show, the Beach Boys showing up at the Tanners’ house and shaking each other’s hands when Joey exclaims, “Wow! You’re Al, you’re Bruce, you’re Brian, you’re Carl, you’re Mike!,” the “Kokomo” jam session in the living room where Joey almost gets Jesse to give the band their demo just before Mike Love thanks them for not bugging them to hear a song they’ve written, and of course, the finale, later that night, where the Beach Boys call their new friends, the Tanner family, onstage to sing “Barbara-Ann” with them while Joey slyly slips the demo tape into Mike Love’s shirt pocket. Wow, so much happens I forgot to resolve the plot that started it all [spoiler alert!]: The Beach Boys let DJ take the entire family to the concert! But then again, such minor details like plotlines and character development take the backseat when you can watch Brian Wilson do his equivalent of hamming it up – DJ: “It’s a long story.” Brian: “They never start the show without us!” Classic rock meets classic television with six Tanners, five Beach Boys, four songs, three commercial breaks, two tickets, and one vegetarian pizza? You got it, dude.

1. Stevie Wonder on The Cosby Show, “A Touch of Wonder,” February 20, 1986.

This is not just the greatest rock and roll sitcom episode, it’s one of the best sitcom episodes, period, as well as the best use of a musical guest star ever, outside of Sammy Davis, Jr. popping up at Archie Bunker’s house in All in the Family. Again, the plotline is rudimentary – Denise’s car collides with Stevie’s limo, prompting Stevie to invite the family to a recording session – but the result is timeless. Watching it again, I am struck by what a great episode of The Cosby Show this is, with many great elements that don’t directly involve Stevie at all: Cliff’s interplay with Rudy when she attempts to fix the grandfather clock (it ends with a “zerbert”), Cliff’s shoddy re-gluing of Claire’s mug to look like one of the kids broke it, Theo answering the phone with the classic “Huxtable residence” twice…the list goes on and on. But of course, it’s the Huxtables’ visit to Stevie’s studio that makes this episode go from great to classic. For a rare time, a rock and roller is at ease with himself and the cast, and is genuinely funny without sounding completely awkward. We also get a look at Stevie Wonder in the recording studio, circa 1986, which would be a treat for any major musician, but is even more so because it gives us an idea of how Stevie records despite his blindness. Watching him with all of those then-state-of-the-art computers didn’t make me wonder what he’s using now, but rather how he made Innervisions over a decade earlier. The studio time is then taken up by two parts: In the first, Stevie interacts with the kids to record samples for his new album (which prompts one of the greatest television lines ever, when Stevie asks Theo what he would say at a party: “Jammin’ on the one!”), and in the second, Stevie sings a duet with Claire (who can actually sing) on “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” his then-recent number one hit. Stevie’s playful joy combined with Claire’s realistic performance (initially reserved and caught off-guard, but slowly warming up in both feeling and vocal) combine into a great moment, and by the time the rest of the kids jump in to sing and clap along with the refrain, you can’t help but wish that this was something that could happen to you and your family. Need to feel a bit better about the world? Try jammin’ on this one.

Films vs. Movies: A Spotter’s Guide

2012-01-09T17:32:00.003-05:00

Most people assume that the words “film” and “movie” are synonymous, but these people are wrong.

A film is a movie at its most artistically successful, while a movie is an entertaining diversion captured on film. The greatest film of all time is “Citizen Kane” (ambitious, innovative, and artistically successful), while the greatest movie of all time is “King Kong” (bigger-than-life cheap thrills-n-chills).

Films are generally in black-and-white, often foreign, and are almost always more “appreciated” than they are thoroughly “enjoyed.” Films are usually longer than movies, and get much better reviews. They also tend to underperform at the box office, in part because nobody goes to see them.

Movies are usually in color, reek of Hollywood, and often utilize the fleeting thrill of the present to the point of dating light-years sooner than films do. They usually follow storylines that are predicable and trite, and take the form of popular genres like science fiction and romantic comedy. They also make a ton of money, even though they often serve as an excuse to either eat popcorn or make out.

One of the surest signs that a film is a film is that it’s made it into the Criterion Collection. Their catalogue includes some of the filmiest films ever made – artsy stuff like “The Seventh Seal,” foreign stuff like “The Bicycle Thief,” influential stuff like “Breathless,” and artsy influential foreign stuff like “8 ½” (and, in varying degrees, all of the above). Sometimes you don’t even need to be able to read to enjoy one of their films (i.e., it’s either British or American), but even then, context is often just as crucial as what’s happening on screen. I mean, how enjoyable is Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” without foreknowledge of where it stands in the canon of filmed Shakespeare? And when was the last time you got together with friends to watch John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln”? (Okay, so I did that once, and then got made fun of by the time the movie was over; turns out that, classic Americanism and cinematography aside, the film can seem pretty damn hokey to the uninitiated. For the record, I still stand by it, even though I probably never would’ve seen it if it wasn’t a Criterion. But I digress.)

Movies, on the other hand, are enjoyed by people who have never heard of the Criterion Collection. Another term for these people is the vast majority. They are a special group of people who know what they like and often just want more of it. As a result, many of the best-remembered movies come with two or more sequels, usually with diminishing returns, which is to say, the movies become increasingly more movie-y. These are things like “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” “Die Hard,” and anything that is animated without subtitles. There is often a film for every great type of movie – a “2001: A Space Odyssey” for every “Star Wars” – but these are usually seen more as academic necessaries than things to be cherished and shared with each new generation.

Sometimes a film can seem like a movie or a movie can seem like a film. Some of the best battles between the two have occurred at the Academy Awards, an institution that likes to think of itself as the chief vehicle for judging film, but more often than not gets sweep up by the populism of movies. How else to explain “Shakespeare in Love,” a movie that was dressed up like a film, beating out “Saving Private Ryan,” a film that moved like a movie, for Best Picture? Or the unprecedented success of “Titanic,” which is either the most self-serious movie or the funniest film ever made? (I mean, the protagonist almost doesn’t get saved because she is making out with a frozen corpse!) However, enough film Davids have overpowered movie Goliaths to give the Academy the illusion that they always know what they’re doing, as when “Annie Hall” and “The Hurt Locker” beat out “Star Wars” and “Avatar,” respectively, for Best Picture; in both cases, the lowest-grossing Best Picture up to that point won by beating out the highest-grossing movie ever up to that point.

Such moments are what give the Academy credibility, at least until you’re reminded that “Taxi Driver,” “All the President’s Men,” and “Network” all lost Best Picture to “Rocky.” But many credit the success of “Rocky” to the fact that it was America’s bicentennial year, and the Academy wanted to go with something more optimistic than a film that invoked the sins of Vietnam (“Taxi Driver”), Watergate (“All the President’s Men”), or the modern media (“Network”).

And perhaps that says it all: Movies are the welcome escape from the starker film-like world we live in.

Just ask Travis Bickle.

The Muppets: An Appreciation

2012-01-04T10:59:00.003-05:00

So I finally got a chance to catch The Muppets, which I am pleased to report more than lived up to the hype. This is no small feat – for fans of the Muppet empire, they are something very special indeed.

For the uninitiated, the Muppets are a group of puppets created by Jim Henson in the 1950s. The first Muppet project was the local Washington, D.C. show Sam and Friends in the ’50s, followed by appearances on variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show and the Jimmy Dean Show in the ’60s, and then a collaboration with the Children’s Television Workshop to create Sesame Street in 1969.

But the centerpiece of the Muppet franchise has always been The Muppet Show, which ran for five seasons in syndication from 1976 to 1981. This show and the original three films it spawned – The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) – create the backbone of the Muppet canon.

But ever since Jim Henson passed away in 1990, the Muppets have been in a precarious state. Beginning in 1992 with A Muppet Christmas Carol, the Muppets lost their way in films like Muppet Treasure Island (1996) and Muppets from Space (1999), as well as on latter-day television shows like Muppets Tonight (1996-1998). By the time more recent fare like It’s a Very Muppet Christmas Movie (2002) and The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005) appeared, the producers didn’t even bother to release them theatrically.

In 2002, the Walt Disney Company was finally able to buy the Muppet franchise after several attempts. But they didn’t really do anything with them. In an interview with Jason Segel, the driving force behind The Muppets, he remembered how, after scripting and starring in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he was called in by Disney to make a more family-oriented film for them. They offered him things like Herbie the Lovebug, but Segel maintained that the untapped goldmine they were sitting on was the Muppets. He pitched making a film that would restart the Muppet franchise and be a worthy addition to the Muppet canon.

To do so was no simple task; Segel had to create something that could meet the expectations of the original Muppet fans, as well as something that played well to their children, who may have never heard of them before. In short, he had to make it funny, hip, self-deprecating, and self-referential, while still being wholesome and witty enough to fit under the Disney label.

Which is exactly what he pulled off – in my estimation, with The Muppets, Segel spearheaded the finest Muppet project since 1987’s excellent-though-largely-forgotten television special, A Muppet Family Christmas.

What makes The Muppets so effective is that it understands that the Muppets have always been powered by nostalgia. The original Muppet Show brings to mind the old joke by Bob Hope he used to tell about (and I believe on) television: “You remember vaudeville? Well, now they’ve put it in a box.” Hope was referring to the vast number of early television stars – people such as Milton Berle, George Burns, Edgar Bergen, Danny Kaye, and Hope himself, all of who would go on to host The Muppet Show – that had cut their teeth in vaudeville. Like characters from the vaudeville era, the Muppets themselves were often little more than brightly-colored, stage-door tropes.

Kermit is the straight man, Miss Piggy is the diva, Fozzie is the groan-inducing comic, Gonzo is the death-defying stuntman, Rowlf is the gravely-voiced piano man, Scooter is the bookish stage manager, and Animal is the manically out-of-control drummer. These seven characters are among the simplest ever conceived, on par with the original Winnie the Pooh gang, Walt Disney characters, or Gilligan’s Island cast; if Freud was to have a look at them, he’d smugly dub Kermit as the Ego, Animal as the Id, and either Miss Piggy or Gonzo as the Superego, depending on what his definition of “Super” and/or “Ego” might be.

Many other well-loved characters who weren’t as central to the original program are featured prominently in the new movie: The Swedish Chef, Bunsen and Beaker, and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, among others. This was a shrewd move because, by featuring these players who always seemed bigger than they actually were, the film favors the mystic chords of memory over the truer chords of reality.

Which brings it all back to nostalgia. While The Muppet Show ran like a tribute to the then-relics of vaudeville, the movie’s central joke is that now it’s the Muppets themselves who are the relics, trying to compete in a world that has moved on without them. The clip where a kid asks Kermit if he is one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was likely included in the television ads not because it’s one of the funniest moments in the film, but because it’s one of the most telling.

It also speaks to the Muppets’ trademark elimination of the fourth wall. Again, this ground had been pioneered by the vaudevillians – such as George Burns, who directly addressed the camera in his television show – but hit a new level of irony and complexity with the Muppets. Theirs was a show about putting on a show, both in terms of the audience in the theater (comprised of Muppets) and the greater world outside (comprised of real people). The fact that The Muppet Show took the time to create a false audience for their false show – which included two of their most durable characters, hecklers Statler and Waldorf – only reinforces how complete the show was unto itself; the equivalent would be if The Flintstones’ animators had taken the time to draw reaction shots of laughing cartoon people to go with the laugh track heard throughout the show.

Presumably for the “live” Muppet audience, they only saw the official sketches of the show, but as the “real” outside audience, we were given the chance to see backstage as well. Each episode usually had a subplot about what was going on behind the curtain, which is part of what made it so interesting. In this regard, The Muppet Show’s closest contemporary would have been The Mary Tyler Moore Show, although its absurdist bent sets it better as the precursor of a show like 30 Rock. Regardless, the backstage element of The Muppet Show is what ultimately set it apart from the vaudeville-influenced ’50s television fare like The Milton Berle Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, because these earlier programs merely showed what was happening on stage. The only thing that comes close to The Muppet Show from this era is Ernie Kovacs’ television specials, which was taking the camera backstage while David Letterman was still in grade school.

So how did The Muppets enter into this world of nostalgia-driven, fourth wall complexities and pull it all off so successfully? By keeping it simple. The entire movie is built around what is basically one big episode of The Muppet Show, that is, a big Muppet telethon to save their Muppet Theater from the takeover and destruction of an evil oil baron (is there really any other kind?). The self-deprecating balance between success and failure that had always marked the Muppets’ humor takes on a new level of meaning as everything hangs on the line depending on whether or not they can pull off their big show.

Meanwhile, the fourth wall grows even more complicated: This is a movie about the Muppets putting on a show for an in-house audience, as well as a wider television audience within the movie, and then finally us, the audience of people actually watching the movie. It is the most complicated fourth wall scenario I have encountered in popular culture since I saw Grey Gardens on Broadway, which was a musical about a documentary in which a woman performed dance routines for an imagined audience as a real actress performing real dance routines for an imagined audience, which now also happened to be a real audience. To quote the great Sir Paul: “And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.”

All of which frames The Muppets as the all-American fairy tale of show business: A ragtag group of underdogs band together against all odds and, after teetering on the brink of complete and utter failure, they [spoiler alert?] succeed beyond their wildest hopes and dreams.

Which brings the final layer of the great fourth wall onion: Through the box office success and critical acclaim of the movie The Muppets, the Muppets were able to prove themselves as significant pop cultural players in the real, modern show business world.

And this is something that is most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, and, of course, Muppetational.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 5: “National Talk Like Snagglepuss Day”

2012-01-02T16:37:00.003-05:00

In line with the recent surge in popularity for “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” (September 19^th, as if you didn’t already know), I would like to propose a “National Talk Like Snagglepuss Day,” to commemorate the revolutionary vernacular of the most influential pink mountain lion this nation has ever seen.

It would be amazing...fantastic...wonderful, even.

According to the cultural center of all things Snagglepuss (okay, his Wikipedia page), his show first began its run on January 30, 1961. While it’s sad that we just missed this date’s 50th anniversary, we can make up for it by making the first “National Talk Like Snagglepuss Day” that much bigger of a deal this January 30th. This gives us some time, but not a lot — some 28 days, according to my calculations — but like all commemorative events, the day is only as big as the people who choose to celebrate it.

I mean, can you imagine the president giving a press conference on such an occasion, trying to walk the fine line between proving that he is “with it” with the regular people while still maintaining the dignity of the office?

It might begin something like this:

“The war in Iraq has been sad. It has been tragic. It has been devastating, even.”

And then he could switch it up a bit and say:

“But the strength and valor shown by our brave men and women in uniform has been nothing if not noble. In fact, it has been amazing, courageous, inspiring, even.”

And then he could go on and wrap up his thoughts in an un-Snagglepuss way, which might divert any attention drawn by the “with it”-yet-distracting cadences of “National Talk Like Snagglepuss Day.” In fact, he could go on and say pretty much whatever he wanted, however he wanted. Until, of course, it is time for him to leave the podium; at this point there are only three words he can say.

“Exit stage left!”

American Wolf’s The Best of 2011

2011-12-26T16:13:00.005-05:00

Best Movie: Super 8

A love-letter to Steven Spielberg’s late-’70s/early-’80s us-against-them, kid-featured supernatural adventure thrillers that we all grew up with (think: The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and in its own way, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Spielberg now serves as executive producer for writer/director J.J. Abrams, who shrewdly sets his Super 8 in the late-’70s to mirror his own youth spent making Super 8 films (the teenage Abrams was so proficient in the medium that he was called in to help restore the early Super 8 films made by Spielberg, who was then enjoying his commercial breakthrough as a major film director). The combination of Abrams’ own youthful filmmaking and the Spielberg movies that inspired him power this tale, about a group of young teenage kids who accidentally witness (and film) a supernatural event while making their own zombie movie on a handheld Super 8, with a rare passion and attention to detail. But make no mistake – this is no tween-friendly Disney utopia; in this movie, kids swear, show hormonal lust, and are poor – in other words, they act like real kids. Seeing the film reach its exciting ragtag kids-against-the government climax, I began to wonder if I would see a better film all year. And then, as I watched a full cut of the kids’ Super 8-filmed zombie during the closing credits, I knew that I wouldn’t. In these moments, Super 8 outdid its influences and subject-matter to become a film about the joy of making film.

Best Television Show: Parks & Recreation

In a year that often felt like an endless parade of everything wrong with American government came a television show about everything right about American government – the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana, in which the pro-big government, liberal deputy director of parks and recreation, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), works under the antigovernment, libertarian parks director Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman). The show’s central joke – that is, even though she is below him, Leslie effectively runs the entire department because Ron favors a hands-off, non-approach to government – could have worn out long ago had it not become a portrait of two people with very different political perspectives checking their egos and ideologies at the door when it comes to what’s best for their town and friendship. It also doesn’t hurt that they are rounded out by the finest ensemble cast on television, with scene-stealers like dim-witted shoeshine-boy/man-child Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt), life-loathing, deadpan intern-turned-secretary April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), and overzealous, entrepreneurial super-striver Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari). (You know a cast is superb when actors as fine as Rashida Jones and Rob Lowe fail to make a stream-of-conscious shortlist.) All of these characters stand united behind Leslie, who in turn works hard to ensure that the government does its best to serve the people it represents. And how many real-life governmental organizations can you say that about?

Best Album: 21 by Adele

Throughout human history, suffering has driven artists to some of their finest achievements. Pop music is no exception – out of the Beatles’ bickering came Abbey Road, out of Bob Dylan’s wrecked marriage came Blood on the Tracks, out of Bruce Springsteen’s almost being dropped by his label came Born to Run, out of Fleetwood Mac’s stormy inter-band relationships came Rumours, out of U2’s near-breakup came Achtung, Baby. And add to that list out of Adele’s heart getting broken by her first true love came 21. Adele had gotten a lot of attention for her debut album 19, which was fine, but not earth-shattering; she seemed to get nearly as much attention about her fuller (i.e., not a stick) figure as she did about her ability to write a killer pop song and deliver it with a hard-earned, whiskey-soaked croon that sounded like everything that Norah Jones was supposed to sound like but never quite did. A few years and one breakup later, she delivered 21, which marks her arrival as a major recording artist. From the pop-soul explosion of opener “Rolling in the Deep,” with a soulful funk that was equal parts Carole King and Aretha Franklin, through the somber piano closer “Someone Like You,” 21 was the rare album that you simply could not get sick of, an album in which every song could have been a single. As a result, it is also that even rarer album that was both the finest and most popular album of the year – perhaps the best example of this we’ve seen since Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Best Song: “Being a Mockingbird” by Bobby Long

2011 was a good year to be a British singer-songwriter with a deep soul and American sensibilities. While Adele ruled the pop airwaves with a broken heart and an unbroken resolve from the moment 21 came out in late January, Bobby Long’s debut for ATO Records, A Winter Tale, slipped by unnoticed one week later. Like Adele’s first album, it was a perfectly fine (if not terribly memorable) debut that placed him squarely in the postmodern folk-realm like a British Josh Ritter. However, towards the end of the album, came its finest (and shortest) song, “Being a Mockingbird,” a lilting waltz that channels both Elliott Smith and Woody Guthrie, with a lyrical assist from Bob Dylan (how else to explain the cryptically perfect opening line “And the night, it rests like a hammer-blow” – which plays like the offspring of Dylan’s own “The wind howls like a hammer”?). What makes the song go from great to transcendent is the female voice that joins in on the choruses with a counter-harmony that is almost heartbreaking in its beauty; I’d go so far to say that this is the finest guest female vocal on a song since Monica Queen popped up on the title track of Belle and Sebastian’s 1997 EP Lazy Line Painter Jane. I just wish I could figure out who the female singer on Long’s song is – there are at least three female vocalists listed in the credits of A Winter Tale, among them Nona Hendryx, one-third of the disco-pop group Labelle – but I can’t seem to get to first base on this one. But in the end it doesn’t matter – between Long’s lyrics, the female singer’s harmonies, and the rich-yet-simple folk instrumentation, “Being a Mockingbird” is the kind of song that feels so timeless it defies the laws of memory and order, a piece of music so instantly-familiar it seems impossible that there was ever a time in which it didn’t exist.

Best Book: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I have not read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Like Isaacson, I rarely spend my time with contemporary figures, preferring the relative safety of historical figures who have long since proven their worth. At least, this is what Isaacson implies in his lovely obituary for Jobs in Time Magazine, in which he describes how he originally turned down Jobs’ offer to write a definitive biography of him, saying that he only worked in the realm of historically great minds like Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. But Jobs eventually wore him down, and the result is a rare feat – the finest living American biographer given full reign to the life of perhaps the most influential living American, right up to and through his young death. (In this light, the only document that comes close to Isaacson’s biography is Alex Haley’s legendary “autobiography” of Malcolm X.) But as I watched on Christmas Day as three generations of family gathered around the children’s new iPad presents with all of the idealized spirit and wonder of a Norman Rockwell painting, I began to think about just how much one man can – and did – alter the way we live in the world. For this reason, I plan to read Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I’m just probably going to read his biography on Benjamin Franklin first.

Best Broadway Show: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

The Actor Formally Known As Harry Potter made a name for himself as plain-old Daniel Radcliffe as he anchored a sly, Mad Men-influenced revival of this classic Broadway musical. It’s said that he spent endless hours perfecting his American accent, and it shows – he has gotten to the point where he sounds so completely and off-handedly American that one of the show’s most thrilling moments came after the musical had ended, when Radcliffe came onstage to promote a benefit charity in his native-born accent. Turning to co-star John Larroquette to continue the pitch, Larroquette looks at him with utter shock and says, “You’re British?!” It was the flawless timing of moments like this that made John Larroquette the real star of the show, at least for me. I had grown up watching him on Night Court, pitied his misuse on The John Larroquette Show, welcomed his return-to-form on The West Wing and Boston Legal, and now found him as hilarious and charming as ever in this, his Broadway debut, for which he would go on to earn a Drama Desk Award and a Tony. The show may have been Radcliffe’s breakthrough – and indeed, it was a major reason for him winning the title of Entertainment Weekly’s Entertainer of the Year – but it was Larroquette’s career apex.

Best Reissue: The Centennial Collection by Robert Johnson

There was a secret about Robert Johnson’s platinum-selling, Grammy-winning, National Registry-making 1990 double-disc breakthrough The Complete Recordings: It was no fun to listen to. The compilers went for historical accuracy over listenability and put all of the songs in strict chronological order, which meant that for many of Johnson’s songs, a near-identical alternate take played after them. To mark what would have been Johnson’s 100^th birthday earlier this year, Sony Legacy overhauled The Complete Recordings as The Centennial Collection, putting the songs from his first sessions in 1936 (16 masters followed by 6 alternate takes) on the first disc and the songs from his second sessions in 1937 (13 masters followed by 7 alternate takes) on the second. Also added was an alternate take of “Traveling Riverside Blues” that had been discovered after The Complete Recordings had been issued. Just as welcome as the new running order is the new sound. Robert Johnson has never sounded so clear, so immediate, and so full. He jumps to life like he never did on the comparatively flat sound of The Complete Recordings, while containing a minimal amount of hiss found on his more robust-but-scratchy vinyl reissues. Throw in newly updated liner notes and information about the master records’ history and remastering, and you have an anthology worthy of its legendary subject.

And One Final Year-End Shout-Out: Frank Buckles (1901 – 2011)

On February 27, 2011, Frank Buckles, the last known living American World War I veteran of the one million “Doughboys” who fought in the war, died at the age of 110 years and 26 days. With him went America’s final surviving link to the Great War, an event of cataclysmic importance and influence that has been overshadowed by the more immediate World War II. His final years were spent raising awareness for World War I (and its long-neglected 1931 memorial on the National Mall), an event that was once known as “The War to End All Wars.” Born a little over six months before President Theodore Roosevelt took office, his funeral was attended by President Barack Obama. If that isn’t an epic life, I’ll never know it.

The Beach Boys’ “Smile”: Unfinished Symphony

2011-12-24T14:40:00.003-05:00

As far as I can tell, one of the biggest events in popular music this year (or most years) went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media: The Beach Boys finally released the album Smile, nearly 45 years after its original due date.

Part of the reason for this event’s lack of attention is because time and Smile-related projects has dulled the album’s mystique over the years. Originally begun by the Beach Boys’ creative leader, Brian Wilson, as an attempt to outdo the Beatles’ Revolver (and eventually, Sgt. Pepper) as well as his own band’s innovative “Good Vibrations” single, the mounting creative and commercial pressures combined with his own psychological frailness and psychedelic drug intake caused Wilson to retreat into his own mad, mad world. He had set out to make what he once called “a teenage symphony to God,” but got lost in the terrain he was trying to map. After a year and a half of missed deadlines and incomplete song structures, the album was abandoned in late 1967. Wilson declared that he had destroyed the tapes containing the album and that it would be lost forever.

Only it wasn’t. Just after the Smile project was abandoned, songs from its sessions began finding their way out into the world on the Beach Boys’ albums – sometimes with new backing or lead tracks, sometimes largely unaltered. And then, in 1993, the Beach Boys released a thirtieth anniversary box set that contained a half hour of music straight from the Smile sessions. A little over a decade later, Brian Wilson teamed up with original Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks and members of the power-pop group the Wondermints to complete the album as Brian Wilson Presents Smile in 2004. The album consisted of entirely newly re-recorded versions of all of the songs, but they were largely based on original Smile session material, which had been circulating among bootleggers for years. And Brian Wilson played a brilliant international tour in which he performed Smile live with the Wondermints backing him up, and it looked as though a chapter of the Beach Boys’ discography was finished.

And that’s how things stood until earlier this year, when Capitol Records announced they were releasing a finished version of the Beach Boys’ Smile – as part of the build-up to the Beach Boys’ 50^th anniversary reunion tour in 2012 – consisting only of the original session material that been declared lost so many years ago.

Given Smile’s legendary reputation as an unfinished lost album, it is often forgotten how close the album was to being finished. When I first heard Brian Wilson’s 2004 “completed” version, I was shocked to hear how little of it was actually new based on the recordings I had heard on bootleg albums. Part of the reason why Wilson was able to pull off the “completed” Smile was because he had already done the vast majority of the hard work some 40 years earlier.

So why should we care that, after the project was abandoned and its chief architect reconstructed and finished it, Smile now exists in its original Beach Boys recordings – unfinished, unpolished, and less unified?

Because the key to Smile’s power lays in the fact that it has always been unfinished. No amount of remodeling or varnish can alter its inherently incomplete state; it is, like the land that it comes from, an unfinished country. To declare an ending point would be a false gesture – to leave it open is to leave it free.

And what an open country it is!

I cannot think of any popular music artifact that provides such a complete picture of America. The only thing that comes close is the Band’s self-titled “Brown Album,” but that sounds like an old sepia-toned photograph compared to Smile’s Technicolor production. In Smile’s majestic sweep, one can find an epic landscape.

Wordless a cappella hymns turn into old doo-wop records; showgirls dance in the cantina while heroes and villains face off in a Spanish and Indian old western town; Plymouth Rock rocks and rolls over; the mystical, sparkling chimes of the bicycle rider cruise through the savage church of the American Indian; farm animals sing an animal symphony in the barnyard while the cooks chops lumber; the plunking banjo of a quiet home on the range gives way to the onslaught of the charging iron horse; atmospheric romantic music dissolves into the clattering hammers and buzzing saws of a woodworker’s shop; vegetables are harvested, celebrated, chomped, and carted off for sale; Mrs. O’Leary’s cow starts the Great Chicago Fire in a blaze of chaos and wonder before getting extinguished by sweet pools of cool water; and in the end, everything turns into good, good vibrations.

The music is as varied as the subject matter, as single voices and instruments unleash some of the thickest, densest sounds I have ever heard – all of the muddled excitement of a Phil Spector record combined with the muddy grit of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. This is what has been missing from all previous releases and remakes of the Smile material – the thick, dense sound that plays like the musical equivalent of the Big Muddy.

And like that waterway, there is much about the record that is unclear, unpolished, unrefined, and at times, seemingly directionless. There are words that get buried in sound and sound that fails to yield any words to shed light on them. At its messy, muddy root, it plays like an incomplete experiment.

But then again, so is the country it documents. As a nation and as an idea, America is an unfinished country, our forefathers brilliantly placing the power of change and amendment directly into the fiber of our governing Constitution. The major events of our history come from unfinished business – the Civil War emerging from the “peculiar institution” of slavery, World War II emerging from the unsettled alliances of World War I, the Civil Rights movement emerging from the broken promises of Reconstruction – and many of our greatest heroes – Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, to name but four – lived unfinished lives. Some compare America to a tapestry, but if that’s the case, it’s a tapestry that’s only partly finished, with strands that are just as likely to fray apart as they are to weave together.

And Smile plays as its national anthem.

The Do-It-Yourself Seasonal Update Letter

2011-12-21T23:11:00.010-05:00

We’ve been getting a crazy amount of seasonal update letters this year. They are all pretty personalized and involved and go far beyond the amount of information given by our home this year (which usually consists of that we hope they enjoy a happy holidays and that our card has been sent with love).

But ’tis the season of giving, and with that in mind, I am creating a do-it-yourself seasonal update letter that can be used for next year and for every year afterwards.

You don’t have to thank me, I am happy to give this out to everyone.

Until I copyright it later this week. Then I expect royalties.

Dear [Plural Noun],

We hope you’re having a(n) [Non-Offensive “Seasonal” Adjective] season. We can’t believe that [National Holiday] is here again already! It’s been such a(n) [Blandly Positive Adjective] year, one filled with many happy [Generic Plural Noun] and exciting [Less-Generic Plural Noun].

I have been quite busy with my position as [Over-Inflated Noun] at [Proper Noun]. I worked hard to move from [Somewhat Impressive Noun] to [More Impressive Noun], and am enjoying the position even though it brings with it an extra level of [Noun]. It’s so great to finally be [Verb]-ing [Plural Noun] after so many years of hard [Noun].

My wife has been [Adjective] balancing her work [Noun] with her home [Noun]. Her work is always [Impressive-Sounding Adjective], and yet, she never ceases to [Even More Impressive-Sounding Verb] us with her ability to also keep our house running [Super-Duper Impressive-Sounding Adverb]. We don’t know how she finds enough [Plural Noun] in the [Noun] to do it all, but we’re [Adjective] that she does!

Our oldest [Noun] is now [Number] and loves attending [Proper Name] School. His/Her [Noun] says that he/she is the [Impressive-Sounding Adjective] [Singular Noun] in the entire [Generic Noun]. He/She is also plays [Musical Instrument, Or Drums] and is having much fun with [Colorful-Sounding Hobby Substituting For Real-Life Direction]. And whenever you need to find him/her, he/she can usually be found [Verb]-ing with friends or [Verb]-ing in front of the [Household Appliance].

Our newest addition to the [Noun] was born on [Date] and was [Number] pounds but is [Non-Radioactive Verb]-ing bigger with each new [Noun]. He/she is finally [Totally Basic Verb]-ing through the [Noun] and [Totally Basic Verb]-ing solid [Plural Noun]. He/She also loves to [Slightly More Advanced Verb] his/her big brother/sister [Verb] all around and is [Slightly More Advanced Verb]-ing new things every day.

We feel so [Quasi-Spiritual Adjective] to have such a(n) [Indiscretely Modest Adjective] family and are so grateful that [Religious Spiritual Being, Or The Politically-Correct Equivalent] has brought us so much [Quasi-Spiritual Noun] and [Peacenik Noun] to our loving [Noun].

Here’s to a(n) [Adjective] [Noun] and a(n) [Adjective] New [Noun]!

Love,

The [Plural Noun]

“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”

2011-12-16T18:57:00.007-05:00

In December 1969, a series of billboards went up in a dozen cities around the world, each with a message in the country’s native language. They read: “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It – Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.”

In his famous extended Rolling Stone interview the following December, John Lennon was asked about the response to this peace campaign.

We got a big response. The people that got in touch with us understood what a grand event it was apart from the message itself. We got just thank yous from lots of youths around the world – for all the things we were doing – that inspired them to do something. We had a lot of response from other than pop fans, which was interesting, from all walks of life and age. If I walk down the street now I’m more liable to get talked to about peace than anything I’ve done. The first thing that happened in New York was just walking down the street and a woman just came to me and said, “Good luck with the peace thing.” That’s what goes on mainly – it’s not about “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And that was interesting – it bridged a lot of gaps.

In December of 1971, John Lennon took this message and turned it into its most durable legacy: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Lennon and Ono came to New York to record the song the previous October, enlisting the help of legendary producer Phil Spector, who contributed his signature echo, and the children of the Harlem Community Choir, who brought the famous “War is over” refrain to life. Although the song was initially not much of a hit – it failed to chart in the US and wasn’t released in the UK until the following November – it grew to become a modern Christmas classic.

Much has been written about “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” its impact, its influence, and its message, but one thing has always struck me about it that I’ve never read anywhere else: Its melody sounds to me like it was lifted from Johnny Ace’s 1954 posthumous R&B hit, “Pledging My Love.”

Although now largely forgotten, Johnny Ace was an influential rhythm and blues singer and songwriter from the early 1950s. When he is mentioned today, it’s usually in reference to his death – he shot himself in the head at the age of twenty-five while backstage at a show in Huston, Texas, on Christmas. The legend had always been that Ace died while playing Russian roulette, but firsthand sources have since contradicted this claim. Always known to fool around with guns, Ace was showing off with one as a girl in his lap, jokingly pointing the gun over here, over there, at the girl, at himself. When people told him to stop he said there was nothing to worry about – the gun was empty, he could prove it by pointing it at his own head and pulling the trigger. He was wrong.

The outpouring of grief that followed was unprecedented for a rhythm and blues singer and became the archetypal rock and roll death, complete with a massive funeral and numerous tribute records. “Pledging My Love” had been released a few weeks before his death but didn’t make an impact until after he died. The song went to number one on the R&B charts in early 1955, stayed there for ten weeks, and even crossed over to the Top 20 pop charts – one of the first rhythm and blues records to do so.

The song became a rock and roll standard, covered by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Jackie Wilson, and most eerily, as the B-side of Elvis Presley’s final single, “Way Down,” which was released before Elvis’s death but didn’t become a big hit until after he died. Sometimes “Pledging My Love” would be altered slightly, and sometimes its title would be amended or substituted with the song’s irresistible opening phrase, “Forever My Darling,” but even as the song faded into the rock and roll ether, the legend lived on.

The most familiar tribute to most modern listeners is Paul Simon’s “The Late, Great Johnny Ace,” the closing song on his 1983 album Hearts and Bones. In it, Simon uses Johnny Ace’s death to frame a song about the death of John Lennon. He sings about the night he learned John Lennon died, from a stranger on the street; the singer and the stranger go inside a bar and stay until it closes. “And every song we played,” the singer concludes, “was for the late, great Johnny Ace.”

Now, I have never been able to find a concrete connection between John Lennon and Johnny Ace outside of this Paul Simon song that neither lived to hear. But I have to believe that John Lennon knew who Ace was and was familiar with the song “Pledging My Love,” given his vast knowledge about early rock and roll and rhythm and blues from the mid-’50s. Pieces of early rock songs appear like phantoms in a number of his songs – the “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man” line in “Run for Your Life,” taken from Elvis’s “Baby, Let’s Play House” (one of the rock and roll songs Lennon performed live on the day he met Paul McCartney); the “Here come old flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly” line in “Come Together,” adapted from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” (Berry was able to successfully sue for copyright infringement) – they are the vocabulary from which he wrote his own music.

I believe that “Pledging My Love,” which was a much bigger hit than either “Baby, Let’s Play House” or “You Can’t Catch Me,” had lodged itself into the recesses of Lennon’s memory such that when he needed a melody for a phrase that he had been using for the past few years, this one presented itself subconsciously. What makes it so unique is that while Lennon would often cop lyrics from old rock songs, it’s rare to have him swipe a melody. Was Johnny Ace’s power such that it went beyond the conscious place of lyrics and into the more ethereal realm of melody? Is it possible that, in sitting down to write a melody for his Christmas song, John Lennon subconsciously connected Johnny Ace’s accidental shotgun suicide on Christmas to the melody of his signature hit that followed? Is this all mere coincidence? Or is it another chapter in the long afterlife of the late, great Johnny Ace?

So here we are at the other end of history – at the other end of the gun that shot Johnny Ace on Christmas 1954; at the other end of the gun that shot John Lennon seventeen days before Christmas 1980, which in turn caused a reissued “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to peak at number two on the UK charts; even at the other end of the gun that “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” producer Phil Spector, who was born a day after Christmas 1940, used to shoot and kill actress Lana Clarkson – and, at long last, at the other end of all of the guns fired by and at American soldiers in the Iraq War.

President Obama stood onstage at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and welcomed home the troops in a grand gesture signaling the end of the Iraq War. It was a simple image that grew more complicated the more one thought about it. Everyone knows that the Iraq War was the signature issue that got Obama elected to the US Senate, which in turn propelled his presidential election, but now he stands on the other side as the President of the United States coming into an election season. He was praising a war he had previously opposed, finding pride and joy in a circumstance that he had previously found futile. Perhaps this was what any president would do in his position – find a pragmatic ending to an unpopular war. Thousands have been shot and killed and it is part of his job to ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” as Abraham Lincoln once said, two years before he was shot.

But as I read the newspaper article about Obama’s speech a few days ago, and considered how his words were a strange tangle of words and performance, spoken and unspoken, symbolic and real, five words came to the forefront of my mind and provided the perfect caption to the article’s link as I posted it on my Facebook page.

They read: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

These words made me wonder what John Lennon would have thought about all of this had he not been shot. Maybe he too would think of his “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” song title, and allow the song to seep deeper into his conscious than he usually reserved for a song he had written and recorded so many years before. It would play in his mind as he contemplated war and peace, the living and the dead, the pen and the sword, the ballot and the bullet.

And then it would hit him, like a bullet, hiding in plain sight as it remained unrealized for decades: “Hey, did I get that tune from that old rhythm and blues song that began, ‘Forever my darling’…?”

And that wouldn’t just be interesting – it would bridge a lot of gaps.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 4: My Million-Dollar (Christmas) Idea/Requiem for a Band Aid Song

2011-12-14T13:14:00.004-05:00

Five words: A Schlock and Roll Christmas.

I love schlocky Christmas songs of the modern rock and roll era and I’ve always wanted to see a compilation that brings them all together in a mix of humor, warmth, and cheesy production values. The chief contenders/offenders would have to include:

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid (1984)
“Thank God It’s Christmas” by Queen (1984)
“Please Come Home for Christmas” by the Eagles (1978)
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” by the Jackson 5 (1970)
“Last Christmas” by Wham! (1984)
“Christmas Time Is Here” by Ray Parker Jr. (1984)
“Must Be Christmas” by the Band (1975)
“Christmas in Hollis” by Run-D.M.C. (1987)
“Christmas All Over Again” by Tom Petty (1992)
“Winter Symphony” by the Beach Boys (1977)
“Pretty Paper” by Roy Orbison (1963)
“Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses (1981)
“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney (1979)
“If Every Day Was Like Christmas” by Elvis Presley (1966)
“Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” by David Bowie & Bing Crosby (1982)
“Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” by John Lennon (1971)

As for the running order, there would only have to be two specifications: “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” would have to be the last song. And “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” would have to be the first.

Now, I love “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and was touched to see people rush to its defense when I included it on my list of the worst Christmas songs of all-time. The song has always been a guilty pleasure for me, somewhere between my Monkees CDs and Doctor Demento singles, and I included it on the worst list because it felt like the better fit – after all, it was the things that were so wrong about the song that made me love it all the more.

It’s like, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is like George Washington: Perfect, regal, and distant, something that can only be marveled at from afar. But “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is like John Adams: Flawed, imperfect, and human, something that tells us far more about ourselves. I mean, who would you rather have a beer with: George Washington or John Adams? Everyone knows that George Washington would be all intimidating and quiet right off the bat, while John Adams would make fun of the ugly waitress before she was even out of earshot.

Thus, I would much rather listen to “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” than “White Christmas.” It’s a fascinating record with numerous elements that should work against it – a baffling structure, overwrought lyrics, and cheesy production values – but somehow manages to hold together and deliver its unique impact. (Its film equivalent would be another artifact that begins with death, basks in weird extremes, and ends with Christmas: Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. But I digress.)

Although I do still stand by statement that “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you” is the cruelest line I’ve ever heard in a Christmas song.

The Top Five Greatest Christmas Songs of All-Time

2011-12-12T12:05:00.002-05:00

Perhaps it’s only natural that after spending the past few days pondering the worst Christmas songs of all-time, my mind can’t help but contemplate what would be the best. It’s certainly an easier list to make.

5. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by Dean Martin (Christmas 1966)

Is Dean Martin the most underrated traditional American pop singer? His Christmas recordings seem to imply he is. Take this song, where he doesn’t sing every word so much as he inhabits it, bringing phrase after phrase to life with subtle inflection, which are in turns seductive (“Put some records on while I pour”), awestruck (“Your eyes are like starlight now”), and pleading (“It’s up to your knees out there”). It only helps that the song’s lead part is sung by a generic harmony of female voices, giving Martin a sort of Christmas Greek chorus to play off of, whose very fakeness loosens him up and allows him to live in the part that much more. It’s an altogether charming and funny song that fits very well into the Christmas mix, even though it technically makes no mention of Christmas itself. And if you need any further evidence of how great Martin’s recording is, just listen to anyone else try to sing it.

4. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love (Christmas 1963)

With the staggering amount of horns, bells, and choruses he used on all of his records, it was inevitable that Phil Spector would eventually turn his talents to Christmas. After spending months on what many consider the greatest Christmas album ever, Spector released it on the morning of November 22, 1963. A few hours later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The record bombed. Now recognized as a classic (Brian Wilson has called it his favorite album), the album re-worked Christmas standards into epic, sexy symphonies like the Ronettes’ “Frosty the Snowman” and the Crystals’ “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” but its best part comes with the only non-standard on the album, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” It is her finest moment as a singer, and arguably Spector’s finest moment as a producer – they take the simple concept of the title and turn it into a yuletide tidal-wave of love, yearning, and devotion. Like the album it came from, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” was not a hit in its own time; it didn’t creep into the national consciousness until the early ’90s, when it was included on the Home Alone soundtrack. Luckily for us, it’s been around ever since.

3. “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole (Christmas 1946)

The opening phrase – “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” – has been so overplayed and over-referenced, it’s easy to dismiss the song that follows as the perfect soundtrack to yet another seasonal instant coffee commercial. But listen again (I certainly never appreciated it until I heard it in the movie theater during Will Ferrell’s Elf, maybe in part because I was then a captive audience) and you’ll find one of the finest performances on record. Although it was originally written and recorded by Mel Tormé (they say that after Cole performed it, Tormé could’ve never picked up a microphone again and would’ve lived very comfortably off of his royalties checks), it took Nat King Cole’s recording to fully realize its full potential. Peaceful as the newly-fallen snow and warm as a cracking fire, this song conjures up Christmas in both sound in words like few other recordings before or since.

2. “Blue Christmas” by Elvis Presley (Christmas 1957)

Among the numerous firsts that Elvis Presley achieved but is little recognized is that he was the first rock and roll star to record a Christmas album. Before Elvis, Christmas was the domain of singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, but never of rock and rollers. Elvis’ Christmas Album changed all of that. I’ve seen it listed as the best-selling Christmas album in the United States as well as the best-selling album of the fifties, period, thanks to its perennial sales. Its finest moment was Elvis’s cover of the almost decade-old country hit “Blue Christmas,” originally recorded by Ernest Tubb. Taking the song into his own hands, Elvis did what he did best – he took country music and drove blues right into the heart of it. It remains a country song only in structure, as Elvis swaggers his way through the lyrics as only he could, surrounded by some of the most tasteful backing vocals ever used prominently on an Elvis record, and a modern pop arrangement that further masked the song’s country origins. The result is not just Elvis’ finest Christmas song, but one of the finest Christmas songs, period.

1. “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby (Christmas 1942)

Could there really be any other song at number one? This is more than just a Christmas song, it’s the closest thing popular music has to a national anthem; according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Crosby’s recording is the biggest-selling single of all-time, with 50 million copies sold worldwide and counting. Originally written by Irving Berlin (who called the song the best he ever wrote) and featured in the Crosby film Holiday Inn, the song eventually spent eleven weeks at number one and received the 1942 Academy Award for Best Original Song. They say part of its initial appeal was that its wistful tone struck a chord with soldiers overseas during World War II, who literally were dreaming of a white Christmas back home. This reception speaks to Bing Crosby’s chief innovation to pop music – the sense of intimacy that came with the electric microphone. Crosby could’ve never been a pop star in an acoustic era; he was a stylist who required technology to pick up his sleek and seductive style. More than any other popular artist, Crosby led the way from music being sung to it being performed. And “White Christmas” is his masterpiece. You can hear what the World War II soldiers must’ve heard – a gentle, stirring voice bringing with it all of the hushed excitement of white snow on Christmas morning. The result is an American institution, a rare musical artifact of near cultural perfection that stands on its own terms alongside recordings like Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”

The Top Five Worst Christmas Songs of All-Time

2011-12-11T21:09:00.009-05:00

’Tis the season to hear the same Christmas songs over and over again.

Let’s face it, somewhere between the day after Thanksgiving and the first week of December, we’re already sick of about 95% of all Christmas music ever recorded. Even the stuff that we haven’t heard. Even the stuff that hasn’t even been recorded yet.

But like Dante, we are all drawn to extremes – and even at that, we are fascinated by evil. (I mean, has anyone actually read any part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy besides The Inferno? That’s what I thought.) Even in the merriest time of the year, evil lurks just one step away.

Remember, on one level, “Santa” is an anagram for “Satan.”

With that in mind, I’d like to present the list of the Top 5 Worst Christmas Songs of All-Time:

5. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid (Christmas 1984)

Yes, yes, this song was written and raised money for a very worthy cause – relief for the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia – becoming the UK’s best-selling single ever up to that time and providing the blueprint for U.S.A. for Africa’s “We Are the World,” which has now totally eclipsed this song in stateside memory. All of which takes away from the fact that “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is a very dumb song. Built on a weird premise (I mean, would the famine victims know it’s Christmas even if they weren’t starving?), it manages to feel both over-worked and unfinished, while structurally it’s a mess: A pile of verses leading to something resembling a refrain, which in turn gives way to a bridge, a very ’80s synthesizer solo, and then an extended coda refrain. The words range from overdramatic (“And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom”) to obvious (“And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime…”), until the record builds to Bono’s bizarre exclamation: “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you!” Are these the cruelest words ever sung in a Christmas song? They trip me up every time I hear them: Here, at the climax of a song that aimed to do (and did) so much good work is a selfish sentiment that insults the very people it was attempting to help. Maybe we should be asking if the record’s producers knew it was Christmastime at all.

4. “The Christmas Waltz” by Frank Sinatra (Christmas 1954)

Out of all of the traditional American singers, it seems like Frank Sinatra should have the most open-and-shut solid Christmas album, especially in his mid-’50s peak on Capitol Records, where he released masterpieces like In the Wee Hours and Songs for Swinging Lovers! Alas, this is not the case. For some reason, a perfect storm of syrupy arrangements, poorly-chosen numbers, half-baked performances, and corny backing vocals prevailed and the album is surprisingly awful. The worst of the lot comes in the middle with “The Christmas Waltz,” as annoying of a Christmas song as ever conceived (the way he sings “And this song of mine/In three-quarters time” makes me shudder), coupled with a production that sounds like The Lawrence Welk Show throwing up all over Disney’s Sounds of the South set. And at the center of it all is the Chairman of the Board (Bored?), half-talking his way through the song as his voice fluctuates between apathy and condescension, stepping aside for the cloying falsetto choir and slogging through the murky swamp of instrumentation like a tired soldier marching through the land of a country he know longer knows or cares about.

3. “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms (Christmas 1957)

Somewhere between when Elvis had his first number one hit in 1956 and when he got drafted into the army in 1958, rock and roll music went from something significant and menacing to, well, something less significant and less menacing. One of the indicators of the trend was this early Christmas-and-pop/rock fusion, which took a half-decent idea and watered it down like cheap eggnog. (A similar offender would be Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” the following year.) There’s a cloying sense of cuteness and opportunism that undercuts any impact the song may have in favor of finger-poppin’, head-boppin’ fun. Plus I jingle hate the jingle way the jingle lyrics jingle every other jinglin’ word, all of which gives the song a poetry and grace on par with Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” and Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth I Am.” When all put together, “Jingle Bell Rock” is far closer to “Jingle Bell” than “Rock,” and that’s never a good thing.

2. “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney (Christmas 1979)

How is it possible that the man behind many of the Beatles’ finest pop songs – “Yesterday,” “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be” – and the driving force behind the most memorable parts of the Beatles’ twin masterpieces – the “Sgt. Pepper” concept of Sgt. Pepper and the long medley on Abbey Road – could have written and recorded this, one of the most awful songs ever made? The production values sound like a sneak preview of everything that would be wrong with pop music in the ’80s – sparse, echoing synthesizers that sound like a David Bowie/Brian Eno collaboration stripped for parts and run through a garbage disposal. For a song that purports to be a celebration of how wonderful Christmastime is, it sounds surprisingly cold and empty. Add to that the almost non-melody of the verse, the lazy descending bridge about the children singing, and the broken record-sounding “Simply having a wonderful Christmastime” refrain, and see if you can get it out of your head before next Easter. The song ultimately defies itself: When it is playing, it is literally impossible to simply have a wonderful Christmastime.

1. “Carol of the Bells” by everybody who ever recorded it (Christmas c. 1930s onward)

Carol of Bells

Makes my life hell

I run away

When it is played

Can’t figure out

What it’s about

Words go to fast

For me to grasp

The melody

Just stresses me

Never brings joy

Only annoys

There is a rhyme

With every line

Want it to stop

But it will not

Stuck in my head

’Til I am dead

There’s no reprieve

It will not leave

Oh, how it pounds

Spins my head ’round

I cannot deal

Just makes me feel—

Very, very, very, very pissed off

On, on again

It never ends

Song has no worth

Just back and forth—

Ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong...

The 100 Essential Albums & Singles of Rock and Roll

2011-12-07T13:24:00.009-05:00

Blame it on the iPhone.

There’s something too tempting about an item that easily fits in your pocket yet can hold several days worth of music. At any rate, owning an iPhone has driven me to perfect what I consider a “basic” rock and roll library (unless, of course, wanting to perfect a basic rock and roll library subconsciously led me to owning an iPhone, but I digress), that is: What’s the smallest amount of music that still tells the complete story of rock and roll?

I first had to set some boundaries. After playing around with some numbers, I found that 50 worked ideally, so I kept myself to 50 albums and 50 songs, for a total of 100 items listed. I also decided to stay within rock and roll’s first 40 years, which I count as from 1954 (the year “Rock Around in the Clock” was released) to 1994 (the year Kurt Cobain died) such that all the music, and the albums they appear on, lands within the confines of these years. Finally, being the retro-hound that I am, I favored the “classic” version of albums, even if they’re out of print (Elvis’s original Sun Sessions LP), missing a few classics (The Best of Sam Cooke), or both (Chuck Berry’s The Great Twenty-Eight). Besides that, pretty much anything was game.

So here it is, 692 songs – the 50 albums and 50 songs not included on those albums – that comprise the essence of rock and roll. In keeping with the project’s overall theme of brevity, I have written quick annotations for each one, more an epitaph than an obituary, more a 45 than a 33 1/3.

This is the basic rock and roll library – the 100 Essential Albums and Singles of Rock and Roll.

Let the debates begin.

Part 1: The 50 Essential Albums

1. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds. A portrait of teenage love perfected (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), pulled back to reveal endless layers of beauty and sadness, hope and regret, instruments and voices. (Capitol, 1966)

2. The Beatles: Rubber Soul. The Beatles take in the lessons of Dylan (both musical and medicinal) and emerge with their first ambitious masterpiece. (Parlophone, 1965)

3. The Beatles: Revolver. The sound of a growing Beatles – John discovers LSD (“Tomorrow Never Knows”), Paul discovers classical (“Eleanor Rigby”), George discovers Eastern meditation (“Love You to”), and Ringo discovers a number one hit (“Yellow Submarine”) – but one that could still stand as a unified band. (Parlophone, 1966)

4. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If not the greatest album of all-time, certainly the most influential; a record that, in perfecting the concept album, cut the history of rock and roll in half. (Capitol, 1967)

5. The Beatles: Abbey Road. And in the end, this was their epic final statement, balanced between a number of signature tunes on one side (John’s “Come Together,” George’s “Something,” Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden”) and one epic suite on the other (Paul’s “Long Medley”). (Apple, 1969)

6. Chuck Berry: The Great Twenty-Eight. Question: Where would rock and roll be without the likes of “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” and two dozen more that I don’t have space to name? Answer: Nowhere. (MCA, 1955-1964/1984)

7. David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. A passion play about an interstellar rock and roll savior, covered in space-age glam but fueled by a human heart. (RCA, 1972)

8. James Brown: 20 All Time Greatest Hits! The history of African American music in the latter half of the twentieth century, as told by the man who pushed it the hardest and took it the farthest. (Polydor, 1956-1976/1991)

9. The Byrds: Greatest Hits. Dylan’s words meet the Beatles’ aesthetics and a new sound is born, a delicate thing of rare, shimmering beauty in the jingle-jangle morning. (Columbia, 1965-1967)

10. Ray Charles: The Best of the Atlantic Years. With “I’ve Got a Woman,” “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” and “What’d I Say,” this is the rock of ages upon which soul was built. (Rhino, 1954-1959/1994)

11. The Clash: London Calling. A sprawling two-record set that begins with a vision of the apocalypse and then works its way through rock, rockabilly, pop, ska, and reggae, remaking it all in its own punk image. (Epic, 1979)

12. Sam Cooke: The Best of. With equal parts gospel, pop, and rhythm and blues, Cooke helped to create the aesthetic of soul music; but with the effortless charm of songs like “You Send Me,” “(What a) Wonderful World,” and “Having a Party,” he may have also been the best rock singer of them all. (RCA, 1957-1962/1962)

13. Derek and the Dominos: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman trade riffs and solos on an extended mediation of blues and rock, best summed up by the blunt title of one the album’s finest songs: “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” (Polydor, 1970)

14. The Doors. A journey through the dark psyche brooding just beneath the surface of psychedelic rock’s diamond sky. (Elektra, 1967)

15. Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home. Bob Dylan goes from acoustic to electric, but not in that order. Oceans rise and mountains crumble, but you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. (Columbia, 1965)

16. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited. Beginning with the gunshot drum hit of “Like a Rolling Stone” – perhaps the most epic opener of any album – this was Bob Dylan’s first fully-electric album. It was also his masterpiece. (Columbia, 1965)

17. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde. Dylan goes down to Nashville, hooks up with some crackerjack studio musicians, and spins wild, surreal tales of love, drugs, and anything else that might go through his heart or mind. (Columbia, 1966)

18. Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You. Aretha Franklin emerges on her Atlantic Records debut fully-formed, bringing the sacred into the secular, the church into the bedroom, and on the opening song, her signature “Respect,” politics into love. (Atlantic, 1967)

19. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On. Rock and roll as a sermon – brave and focused on heaven, but weary as hell. (Tamla, 1971)

20. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced. The most stunning debut in rock music; after listening to this archetypal explosion of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, it became clear why no question mark was needed at the end of the album’s title – it was a question that answered itself. (MCA, 1967)

21. Buddy Holly: The “Chirping” Crickets. A rare long-playing masterpiece from rock and roll’s first decade, although when peppered with songs like “That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!,” and “Maybe Baby,” could it be anything less? (Brunswick, 1957)

22. Michael Jackson: Thriller. For one brief, shining moment – best heard in the post-disco strut of the album’s lead single, “Billie Jean” – the entire intertangled worlds of rock, pop, and soul met in a single place, before becoming so splintered that they could hardly stay unified within themselves, let alone between each other. (Columbia, 1982)

23. Elton John: Greatest Hits. With “Rocket Man,” “Daniel,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” and “Your Song,” the sound of a thousand AM radios in the seventies, and a million FM classic rock stations ever since. (MCA, 1970-1974/1974)

24. Janis Joplin: Greatest Hits. She dressed like a hippie and had hits like a pop star, but make no mistake – this was a blues singer down through her very tortured soul. (Columbia, 1967-1970/1973)

25. Led Zeppelin: Untitled [IV]. A virtual greatest hits album by the archetypal heavy metal band, kicking off with “Black Dog,” anchored by “Stairway to Heaven,” and closing with “When the Levee Breaks.” (Atlantic, 1971)

26. Jerry Lee Lewis: 18 Original Sun Greatest Hits. Rock and roll’s most ignoble son is mad: Mad call I it, for to define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad? (Rhino, 1956-1961/1984)

27. Little Richard: Here’s Little Richard. The sound and spirit of the ranters and ravers, as reimagined for the kiddies in ten little words that started a thousand rock and roll bands: “A-wop-bob-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!” (Specialty, 1957)

28. Madonna: The Immaculate Collection. A playful survey of the Material Girl in the Material Age, until the masterful “Like a Prayer” comes on and the artist suddenly lives up to her name. (Sire, 1983-1990/1990)

29. Bob Marley: Legend. The fact that this is the best reggae-selling album of all time – in large part because everybody ever owns it (just start asking around) – can obscure the fact that it is also a brilliant collection of brilliant music by a brilliant performer; I mean, if there’s only one reggae album you’re gonna own… (Island, 1972-1981/1984)

30. Van Morrison: Astral Weeks. Ignored upon its release, indispensible now, few records have been so ambitious if only because so few performers have been so uncompromised. You breathe in, you breathe out. (Warner Bros., 1968)

31. Nirvana: Nevermind. Punk’s last gasp-turned-“alternative” music revolution courtesy of a Northwestern trio led by a loser who used to live under a bridge. (DGC, 1991)

32. Elvis Presley: The Sun Sessions. The birth of rock and roll as anchored by five perfect singles with a blues song on one side and a country song on the other. Have you heard the news? (1954-1955/1976)

33. Elvis Presley: Elvis’ Golden Records. With “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “All Shook Up,” a near-perfect summation of the music that made the man king, just before the army came along and stole his crown. (RCA, 1956-1957/1958)

34. Prince and the Revolution: Purple Rain. The Purple One at the peak of his skill, talent, and popularity, turning funk into confession and sex into love. (Warner Bros., 1984)

35. Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The Sgt. Pepper of rap music, or Huey Newton with two turntables and a microphone…and the endless wail of police sirens. (Def Jam, 1988)

36. The Ramones. Four punks, three chords, two minutes, one revolution. (Sire, 1976)

37. Otis Redding: Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul. Sung like blues, marketed like soul, and backed by funk, this was music that dug so deeply into the earth it felt bottomless. (Stax, 1965)

38. The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet. The return of five prodigal sons with a sympathy for the devil, striking the pose of street fighting revolutionaries. (Decca, 1968)

39. The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed. An apocalyptic funeral for the 1960s, released one day before Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death at the Stones’ free concert celebrating its release. (Decca, 1969)

40. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. A dense, gritty mudpit of sound where blues bravado intertwined freely with honky-tonk sleaze and bodies lay on the floor all around. (Rolling Stones, 1972)

41. Diana Ross & The Supremes: Every Great #1 Hit. Motown in its Platonic form with twelve number one pop hits – still the most ever for an American vocal group. (Motown, 1964-1969/1974)

42. Run-D.M.C.: Raisin’ Hell. The video for the lead single “Walk This Way” was stupid – featuring Steven Tyler literally breaking down the wall between rock and rap with his microphone stand – but it also was right on the mark. The album it heralded was the finest by Run-D.M.C., which means it was the finest by any rap group up to that point. (Profile, 1986)

43. The Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. The seminal album of the punk revolution (or lack thereof) that took the future – your future – and pounced on it like a tiny bug. (Warner Bros., 1977)

44. Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water. A portrait of the crumbling late ’60s in beautiful harmonies and remorse, as executed by two men who grew to hate each other so much they ceased to be a group by the time the album hit the stores. (Columbia, 1970)

45. Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run. Rock and roll’s biggest fan makes his bid for its biggest statement, and for a moment, gets it. (Columbia 1975)

46. U2: The Joshua Tree. Irish soul meets the American soil, as sculpted by a British eclectic and a Canadian visionary. (Island, 1987)

47. The Velvet Underground & Nico. The place where the modern meets the postmodern, this is music that has been so endlessly ripped-off that it’s difficult to hear just how completely unprecedented its once was, yet remains so far ahead of its time that everyone is still trying to catch up. (Verve, 1967)

48. The Who: Who’s Next. The point at which the Who turned the corner from being the “Maximum R&B” group of the ’60s to the loudest arena-rock band of the ’70s; and on songs like the storming opener (“Baba O’Riley”) and the storming closer (“Won’t Get Fooled Again”), the first — and so far only — successful use of synthesizers in rock and roll. (Polydor, 1971)

49. Stevie Wonder: Innervisions. Fresh off the one-two punch of an artistic breakthrough of Talking Book and a near-fatal car accident, Wonder shut himself in the studio, turned himself into a one-man band, and dug deep into his soul, which is to say, soul itself. (Tamla, 1973)

50. Neil Young: After the Gold Rush. An effortless tale of love, anger, and remorse, told just as the 1960s were collapsing into the 1970s, by an iconoclast who would use his experiences in the former to help define himself as the quintessential artist of the latter. (Reprise, 1970)

Part 2: The 50 Essential Songs

1. The Band: “The Weight.” The rock ballad as a pilgrimage, spending equal time with the beautiful, the holy, and the damned. (Capitol, 1968)

2. The Beach Boys: “Good Vibrations.” A staggering masterpiece of sound and production, completed just before Brian Wilson lost his way. (Capitol, 1966)

3. The Beatles: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Their international breakthrough. (Parlophone, 1963)

4. The Beatles: “Yesterday.” Their (and the) most-covered song. (Capitol, 1965)

5. The Beatles: “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Their finest recording. (Capitol, 1967)

6. The Beatles: “Hey Jude.” Their best-selling single. (Apple, 1968)

7. Chuck Berry: “You Never Can Tell.” Scenes from a marriage, rock and roll style – lost in the mid-’60s pop charts and found by the Pulp Fiction soundtrack thirty years later. (Chess, 1964)

8. Ray Charles: “Hit the Road Jack.” Playful, catchy, and fun – a highlight of the Genius’s brief burst of creativity in the early ’60s, just before the long, slow slide into schmaltz. (ABC, 1961)

9. Chubby Checker: “The Twist.” American independence as a dance craze. (Parkway, 1960)

10. Jimmy Cliff: “The Harder They Come.” Not just the first sound of reggae, years before Bob Marley would become a household name, but proof that rock and roll had broken through to the third world. (Island, 1973)

11. Sam Cooke: “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Passionate, heartbreaking, and controversial, this was the greatest soul ever sung. (RCA, 1964)

12. Bo Diddley: “Bo Diddley.” The beat that launched a thousand songs, yet this one is still the best. (Chess, 1955)

13. Fats Domino: “Blueberry Hill.” The signature song of rock and roll’s steady-rolling New Orleans piano man – a rare rock founder who exercised warmth over rebellion. (Specialty, 1956)

14. Bob Dylan: “Lay Lady Lay.” Dylan quits cigarettes, goes country, and scores a top ten hit. (Columbia, 1969)

15. Bob Dylan: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” An instant standard, which first appeared on a soundtrack that nobody heard to a film that nobody saw. (Columbia, 1973)

16. Bob Dylan: “Tangled Up in Blue.” The flagship song for Dylan’s finest comeback to date – although it wouldn’t be his first or his last… (Columbia, 1975)

17. The Eagles: “Hotel California.” A mid-seventies rock and roll state of the union: Paradise in hell, free will as a prison, pink champagne on ice. (Asylum, 1976)

18. The Everly Brothers: “Bye Bye Love.” The primer for any group who wants to employ two-part harmonies as a lead vocal. (Cadence, 1957)

19. The Four Tops: “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” An enormous-sounding record, tightened by all of the suspense and drama of a monster truck teetering at the edge of a cliff. (Motown, 1966)

20. Marvin Gaye: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” A masterful, deceptively simple performance that gets richer with each listen; maybe that’s why it became Motown’s best-selling single up to its time. (Motown, 1968)

21. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: “The Message.” Rap music turns its focus from the party inside the loft to the warzone out in the street. (Sugar Hill, 1982)

22. Bill Haley and His Comets: “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock.” The shot-heard-’round-the-world rallying birth cry of the rock and roll revolution. (Decca, 1954)

23. Jimi Hendrix: “All Along the Watchtower.” Hendrix’s production masterpiece as well as his only American Top 20 hit (!); Bob Dylan’s original acoustic version was merely the preliminary sketch – after hearing this, even Dylan conceded that he could never perform the song with an acoustic guitar again. (MCA, 1968)

24. The Impressions: “People Get Ready.” A stirring vision with hands on the guitar and eyes on the prize; this train was bound for glory. (ABC, 1965)

25. The Jackson 5: “I Want You Back.” The greatest debut single of all-time? It was certainly the most exciting – and danceable. (Motown, 1969)

26. The Kingsmen: “Louie Louie.” Ground zero for punk rock: Three chords that everyone could play and mangled words that no one could understand. (Jerden, 1963)

27. The Kinks: “You Really Got Me.” Heavy, on the road to becoming heavy metal; I once gave a friend a list I wrote of the top 100 rock and roll moments and this was his response: “What about Dave Davies rips the cones out of his amp?” (Pye, 1964)

28. John Lennon: “Imagine.” Radical socialism disguised as wistful sentimentality. (Apple, 1971)

29. Martha and the Vandellas: “Dancing in the Street.” A rock and roll call-to-arms/answer record to the urban upheavals of the mid-sixties that offered dancing over rioting, hope over anger, and music, sweet music. (Motown, 1964)

30. Van Morrison: “Brown-Eyed Girl.” The soundtrack to everyone’s favorite summer fling, or at least the way we choose to remember it. (Bang, 1967)

31. Roy Orbison: “Oh, Pretty Woman.” After countless songs of heartbreak and pain, rock and roll’s most beautiful yet awkward singer finally gets the girl – in the final seconds of the record. (Monument, 1964)

32. The Penguins: “Earth Angel.” An unfinished demo that was buried on the flipside of a single, got played on the radio, and became one of the most natural hits of rock and roll, all thanks to the entire world turning on Cleve Duncan’s vocal trill, almost exactly halfway through the record. (Dootone, 1954)

33. Elvis Presley: “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The signature song off of the otherwise forgettable Blue Hawaii soundtrack, which became the best-selling album of his lifetime; now, freed from vinyl, the song is currently Elvis’s most-downloaded song. (RCA, 1961)

34. Elvis Presley: “Suspicious Minds.” The centerpiece of Elvis’s late-’60s comeback work, as well as his final American number one; as a study of tension and paranoia, it rivals Vertigo, as an exercise in sweat and passion, it rivals Elvis’s finest work – which is to say, it rivals the finest rock and roll. (RCA, 1969)

35. Elvis Presley: “Burning Love.” One final burst of joy before the sorry decline; a rival to “Louie, Louie” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ on” as rock and roll’s greatest #2 hit single? (RCA, 1972)

36. Otis Redding: “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay.” Written while listening to Sgt. Pepper over and over on headphones, recorded three days before his plane crashed into the icy waters of Lake Monona. (Stax, 1967)

37. R.E.M.: “Radio Free Europe.” A profoundly weird record that pointed the way to the future – half-mumbled, college radio-thriving mysticism – even if no one heard it at the time. (Hib-Tone, 1981)

38. The Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” The Wall of Sound, Version 2: Mature, dynamic, and as subtle as a tidal wave. (Philles, 1964)

39. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles: “The Tracks of My Tears.” A three-minute testimony of why Bob Dylan probably wasn’t joking when he famously called Smokey Robinson America’s greatest living poet. (Tamla, 1965)

40. The Rolling Stones: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The greatest riff ever played. (Decca, 1965)

41. The Rolling Stones: “Paint It, Black.” An attack on psychedelic rock and roll, with tar brush in hand. (Decca, 1966)

42. The Rolling Stones: “Honky Tonk Women.” A subversion of country into blues, as well as the Stones’ best-selling stateside single. (Decca, 1969)

43. The Ronettes: “Be My Baby.” The Wall of Sound, Version 1: An endless sea of instruments, voices, and echo that could be summoned into submission by a single kick-drum. (Philles, 1963)

44. Sly & The Family Stone: “Family Affair.” Only Sly Stone could take a profoundly weird, drug-induced horror story about race, murder, and inequality and turn it into a smooth and funky number one hit. (Columbia, 1971)

45. Patti Smith: “Gloria.” Punk’s greatest poet throws down the gauntlet in just eight words or less: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” (Arista, 1975)

46. The Temptations: “My Girl.” A soaring number one classic that has become one of the most durable Motown productions; most people forget the song had its humble origins as a companion piece to the comparatively-forgotten Mary Wells’ “My Guy,” which itself hit number one. (Gordy, 1964)

47. Ike & Tina Turner: “River Deep, Mountain High.” The Wall of Sound, Version 3: A raging apocalypse of sound and vision. (Philles, 1966)

48. The Who: “My Generation.” One bass solo, two key changes, three instruments, and four musicians, all hanging on the five most exciting words ever (almost) stuttered in a rock song: “Why don’t you all f-f-f—” (Brunswick, 1965)

49. Stevie Wonder: “Superstition.” The funkiest funk ever told. (Tamla, 1972)

50. Neil Young: “Heart of Gold.” Rock and roll’s most uncompromising rebel at his most surprising: Singing a friendly, mainstream number one hit. (Reprise, 1972)

The Making of the PEZident

2011-12-05T11:15:00.002-05:00

It was brought to my attention that PEZ has issued the first in a series of dispensers depicting the Presidents of the United States. Volume 1, which came out last month, begins with the first five “PEZidents”: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.

It took me a minute to find the corresponding link on the PEZ website because, much to my shock and dismay, it was somehow not featured on the main “News & Media” section of their homepage. Instead, I found pieces about similar collectable sets depicting the Lord of the Rings cast and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as the launching of two new PEZ flavors: Strawberry-vanilla and raspberry-lemon.

Now, maybe it’s because I boycotted Lord of the Rings series (I was turned off by the trailers for the first movie, which seemed to pitch it like, “Yes, this WILL be the greatest movie-going experience you will ever have, and you’re welcome…”), find most Snow White-related material lovely but uninteresting (take THAT, two Hollywood movies in post-production plus that TV show with the chick from Big Love playing a Snow White who doesn’t know she’s Snow White even though there is someone in the world who somehow does know she is Snow White…I think it’s called “Snow White, But Snow Wrong”), or the fact that all PEZ flavors I’ve ever had taste the same (sorta like a cross between toothpaste and children’s chewable Tylenol), but I thought it was a travesty that the PEZ people weren’t pushing their new PEZident series harder.

In fact, in order to find a proper mention of it, I had to go from PEZ’s “Products” page to the “Gift/Collector Sets” page, and then to the “PEZ Education Series” page, where, lo and behold, one lonely set of the first five PEZidents was the only item displayed on this otherwise blank page. Clearly, the education crisis has found its way to PEZ candy dispensers. Meanwhile, alongside the so-called “PEZ Education Series” are other collector series deemed worthy enough to merit their own eponymous product lines – namely, Thomas the Tank, Hello Kitty, and, yes, the Lord of the Rings series.

Has the image of America sunken to such a point that when an internationally-renowned candy corporation unveils a wholly unprecedented series of dispensers based on the men who risked life and limb to secure their country’s liberty, the company doesn’t even think to feature it prominently on their own website?

About thirty-five years ago, PEZ unveiled a smaller series of great Americans to celebrate the country’s bicentennial. This was a cruder era of candy-dispenser design, so all of the dispensers shared the same generic face with different hairstyles and headpieces to differentiate between them. Three specific individuals were given their own dispensers, for accomplishments based on myth as much as reality: Daniel Boone (who had legitimate historical achievements), Paul Revere (who had over-exaggerated historical achievements), and Betsy Ross (who had entirely fabricated historical achievements). Tellingly, the rest of the dispensers in the series were generic people who matched the line’s generic face: “Pilgrim,” “Indian Maiden,” “Wounded Soldier,” and “Uncle Sam.”

Now, the PEZident series is a vast improvement over the bicentennial one – each president has his own sculpted and recognizable face. It would be impossible to imagine doing the set otherwise. As Joseph Ellis has pointed out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, when Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the rest had their portraits painted, they were consciously striking a stoic pose because they knew that the eyes of the future would be looking back upon them. They wanted to look good.

And, as with most things, the founders proved prosaic. As a result of their hard work and sacrifice, American freedom grew – first within the nation’s borders through statehood and emancipation, and then outside of the nation’s borders through a free-trade capitalist world economy. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in 1945, the same year that America established itself as the dominant postwar power by dropping the atomic bomb, the Austrian-based PEZ candy company introduced its first dispenser.

The original PEZ dispensers were just plain dispensers – no head, no fun. But shortly after PEZ franchised its first American branch in 1952, plastic heads were added to the dispensers to better market them for children. American consumerism and novelty plastic heads proved to be a match made in heaven. Even though PEZ was still an international operation, some of the earliest dispenser heads screamed American industry: Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, Popeye, a sci-fi robot, a space gun.

Whether or not anyone realized it at the time, PEZ was the perfect product for America’s new postwar economy. It was cheap, attractive to the newly-realized youth demographic, and essentially useless – a market focused around consuming product that you didn’t really need as based on the whims of flash and novelty. I mean, whenever a PEZ dispenser ran out of candy, who just bought the candy refills? Isn’t it more exciting to get a newer, better dispenser that was never available before? A collector’s industry was born, soon to join the classy ranks of vintage cereal boxes and back issues of TV Guide.

The PEZ people know that they have created an in-house demographic, one that is usually wealthier than the kids they used to market to, and so they are now issuing deluxe, multiple PEZ dispenser series, which brings us back to the PEZidents.

The PEZidents could be the candy company’s ultimate statement: The brave, bold men of yesteryear sculpted in plastic on top of a stack of cheap candy. What could be more American than that? Such an artifact would bring America’s story full-circle, from the stoic, singular national portraits marveled at from afar to the mass-produced, interchangeable, and internationally-marketed plastic busts that fit in your pocket.

Plus, I’d like to think that underneath it all, the founding fathers would get a kick out of seeing themselves in PEZ dispenser form. Well, maybe not Washington or Jefferson. But I have a feeling that it would make John Adams laugh like hell.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 3: The Hood, the Bat, and the Ugly, Or, Why Christian Bale May Just Be The Second-Greatest Actor of His Generation

2011-12-03T14:35:00.002-05:00

My favorite part of the The Dark Knight is when Christian Bale puts on the batsuit and magically turns into Clint Eastwood.

I know he’s supposed to be talking about the Joker or whatever, but whenever he has the mask on and his voice hits that suddenly gravely, no-nonsense tone, I’m always ready for him to say things like: “I don’t teach girls how to box.” “Stay away from my Gran Torino.” Or, “I can’t seem to change my facial expression.”

I think it’s a credit to Christian Bale’s craft that he is able to keep himself from saying lines such as these and stick to the script he’s given. A lesser actor might not be able to focus. But not Bale. He can talk like Batman and sound like Eastwood without a moment’s distraction – a sort of A-lister version of being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But what’s even more surprising is that Christian Bale turning into Clint Eastwood isn’t even the most amazing feat of acting in The Dark Knight. There is another actor who uses a deft combination of skill, commitment, and makeup to create a transformation so complete and unexpected it is wholly astounding.

I’m referring, of course, to when Katie Holmes magically turns into Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Why Thanksgiving Is the Most Totally Awesome Holiday in America

2011-11-29T10:31:00.002-05:00

After reflecting upon what has been another very enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday, I began to wonder if Thanksgiving is in fact the most totally awesome holiday in America. Intrigued, I made a list to test my theory out. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but so far I agree with myself.

Thanksgiving only improves with age.

As anyone who has known me for at least fifteen minutes can attest, I was born on Christmas. This made that already-special day take on even greater significance since it was also my birthday (other people on Team Christmas Birthday: Humphrey Bogart, Clara Barton, and Sir Isaac Newton). However, somewhere around the onset of adolescence, one begins to discover that days such as Christmas and your birthdays yield diminishing returns (even when they are on the same day). Not so with Thanksgiving. It’s the rare holiday that actually gets better as you get older. Things like the glory of stuffing are lost upon the under-12 demographic, while activities like sitting around and listening to the older relatives’ stories are wasted on the ears of the youth. Usually adult holidays are depressing (Memorial Day), boring (Secretary’s Day), or nondescript (Labor Day), but Thanksgiving is an adult-centered day that is essentially enjoyable. At least until the hangover kicks in.

You can always wish people a Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve had the privilege of coming of age during a time of intense cultural changes for our country: The end of the Cold War, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the awkward transition from saying “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays.” Now, in a post-“Merry Christmas” world, any greeting that refers to that sacred Christian day comes with a tinge of political incorrectness, a sort of white man’s burden of the WASP set. We aim for multicultural diversity but wind up with bland compromise. But you can wish anyone a Happy Thanksgiving and not run the risk of that awkward pause followed by the word “Actually…” In a nation of blue and red holidays, Thanksgiving is a purple one.

There’s no Thanksgiving music.

Now, I love Christmas music in theory, but when it comes down to it there’s only a half dozen seasonal albums I ever need to listen to (let’s see: Elvis, Phil Spector, Charlie Brown, Dean Martin, John Fahey…alright, that’s actually less than half a dozen). This is because there’re only a few dozen Christmas songs, and they’ve all been recorded a million times. Does Michael Bublé or Kenny G really think they’re gonna add something significant to the Christmas canon with one more elevator-music rendition of “White Christmas”? Now, I’ve always felt the music industry is missing a goldmine by not having bands release Thanksgiving records. Think about it: Unlike the limitations of Christmas music, this is a completely open field – there can be no trite rehashing of music because there are no Thanksgiving songs. To paraphrase Robert F. Kennedy, some people look at the holiday music that is and say why, but I look to the holiday music that isn’t and ask why not.

Thanksgiving is the fastest holiday.

Unlike the twelve days of Christmas or the what-am-I-going-to-be pre-scramble of Halloween, Thanksgiving is a self-contained holiday, neatly lining up with the ever-increasing speed of our postmodern attention span (or lack thereof). It’s the only holiday that’s not even an entire day – it’s a part of the day, something that can’t be said for holidays as diverse as Easter, Martin Luther King Day, or Veteran’s Day. Yes, the meal often begins early, but if you play your cards right, you can also end early – thanks in no small part to all that “food coma”-inducing turkey.

Thanksgiving is based on a fairy tale that isn’t a mask for racism.

Okay, so there was no turkey eaten at the first Thanksgiving, but aside from that, the raw idea of Thanksgiving – Pilgrims and Indians breaking bread together after the harvest – is essentially true. Compare this with Columbus Day, where we celebrate a tyrant who slaughtered Indians and died without even knowing that he “discovered” a new continent. Even the Fourth of July was originally based on the tacit assumption that “All men are created equal” translates to “all free, white landowning males are created equal.” In a country that hides and manipulates its own history in order to save face, Thanksgiving is as close to well-intended history as possible, plus it’s the only day I can think of that’s indebted to Indians. Not bad for a country that remembers Crazy Horse’s First Slaughter as Custer’s Last Stand.

Thanksgiving has the better TV episodes.

This one seems counterintuitive because there are more Christmas episodes, but in terms of quality, they have nothing on Thanksgiving. Remember the Cheers with the Thanksgiving food fight? Or The Bob Newhart Show where the guys all get drunk at an “orphans” Thanksgiving (four words: “moo goo gai pan”)? Or the WKRP where they do the Thanksgiving promotion of launching turkeys from an airplane, unaware that turkeys can’t fly? Or the Fresh Prince where Will’s mom makes the kids cook Thanksgiving dinner (it gets bonus points for Will and Carlton’s “hip” teacher’s “Hamlet” rap)? Or the Seinfeld where Elaine knocks the pointy thing from the window of the celebrity dentist’s apartment so that it deflates Mr. Pitt’s Woody Woodpecker balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade (okay, like all great Seinfeld episodes, it’s kind of complicated to explain)? And remember: Thanksgiving provided the best fodder for Friends’ awkward ’80s flashbacks with fat Monica and pre-nose job Rachel. I could go on further, but I think I’ve made my point.

Thanksgiving is the rare holiday that’s consistent with our national values.

Halloween encourages children to dress up and then rewards them for being something they are not. Christmas alleges to be the most religious of days, but is spent by most families doing weird pagan rituals that have been reinforced by the greeting card industry. And Valentines’ Day? Just ask any ’60s burnout how the whole “All you need is love” thing worked out. No, Thanksgiving is not trying to be anything that it isn’t – it’s a day reserved for sitting around and overeating and drinking in front of the TV in preparation for going out on the biggest shopping day of the year. And if that isn’t a quintessentially American day, I don’t know what is.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 2: Gettin’ out of My League

2011-11-18T18:20:00.003-05:00

At the risk of completely stereotyping against jock-types (not that that’s ever stopped me before), I believe that the whole idea of fantasy football is wasted on a demographic that isn’t the least bit aware of the full potential such an activity holds.

This is a fantasy football league, people! They’re not real teams! You aren’t really in charge of them! So why limit yourself to current football players? If this is truly a made-up fantasy world, you should be able to bring players back from the dead. I mean, imagine if you could build your little pretend team around Jim Thorpe? Or, um, some other dead football player – he’s the only dead one I can apparently name. In fact, outside of O.J. Simpson and whatever the Refrigerator’s real name is, Jim Thorpe is the only non-current player I can name, period. Oh wait, there was the guy who ran the café in My Two Dads. Oh, and the dad on Webster. But I digress.

As this last tangent shows, I would have a most awesome fantasy football team ever because I wouldn’t make the silly mistake of limiting myself to people who are and/or were professional football players. Let’s keep things interesting, people. I bet Abraham Lincoln woulda been one heck of a player – 6’4” and he can out-chop any other rail-splitter in this-here county? Done – Abe, you’re playing for me. Teddy Roosevelt too, he must’ve kicked some ass in his day. In fact, I have a recording of a speech he made to a boys club comparing something (life, maybe?) to a football game. Y’know, trying to keep the kiddies’ interest and all that. But if any of those kids had shown disinterest and mouthed off, you know he coulda charged right into the crowd. And while we’re on the subject of presidents, wasn’t Gerald Ford All-American? And Ronald Reagan played Knute Rockne – oh wait, I can name another dead football star. (P.S.: Am I the only one to notice that all the presidential football players are Republicans? Damn you, the Kennedy Clan and your damn wussy touch football games!)

So yeah, I like where this is going. Pretty bad-ass. We get a fantasy league of dead presidents – Lincoln, Teddy, Ford, Reagan – throw in a few live ones – well, Barack Obama (George W. can cheerlead from the side) – and then keep Knute Rockne as an alternate (he can give Abe pointers on offense and Ronnie pointers on acting) and have Will Rodgers play defense (okay, I don’t think Will Rodgers would be any good at football, but he would have hilarious things to say about participating in a game with half a dozen dead presidents).

And then, of course, I’d center the whole team around Jim Thorpe.

Now, there’s a Super Bowl I would watch. Just imagine what they could do for the halftime show, let alone who would have the wardrobe malfunction. And the victory party? Sign me up.

Dead prez, consider yourself drafted; fantasy football, consider yourself welcome.

Random Thoughts, Vol. 1: Good Book, Bad Intentions

2011-11-14T11:32:00.002-05:00

They say that the Bible is the most stolen book in the United States. While most people find this surprising or ironic, I think it makes perfect sense. If people are stealing the Bible, they probably haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet; thus, they haven’t learned that “Thou shalt not steal.”

I think the real tragedy here is that the Bible is not the most returned book in the United States. But this may not be as much people consciously defying moral standards as it is a reflection that most people buy books not to read, but to put on their shelves so that they look smart when people come over.

And as the Word of God, is there any smarter-looking book to own besides the Bible?

That is, until David McCullough releases his next book about some historical thing that you never cared about until he put his name on it.

Retailin’ It Like It Is

2011-11-10T22:26:00.004-05:00

While pissing away the final moments of an employee lunch break (literally, I’m afraid), a dark epiphany crossed my mind: When my birthday occurs next month, I’ll have spent over half of my life working retail, on and off. It’s less a career choice than it is an old high school flame that I find myself hooking up with every time I come home for Thanksgiving -- so easy, so accessible, yet ultimately, so wrong. But as life throws you curveballs, it’s the one thing you can always come back to.

I came up through the music stores such that my resume now looks like a tombstone: Tower Records, followed by Virgin Superstore, followed by Borders Books, Music, & Cafe. The music industry has now left me stranded among the last gang in town: Barnes & Noble, a solid company though surely not a stupid one; I can almost watch as the inventory ominously disappears like the limbs of Marty McFly’s siblings in that photo during the original Back to the Future. We live our days on borrowed time.

Despite all of these changing companies, positions, and policies, there are some retail truisms that have remained constant such that I feel they are worth relating here. Hopefully they will provide pearls of wisdom upon which future generations can meditate, ponder, and absorb. At any rate, I call this lesson: My Top 3 Really, Really Annoying Things Customers Do That Piss Me Off When I’m Working Retail.

1. The Magical Backroom

Somewhere, in a magical time of castles and kings there was a place where every single stock item that anyone ever wanted was kept. Despite all of the things that we’ve been able to shed from the dark ages -- the black plague, barbers as doctors, a geocentric theory of the universe -- this one has stubbornly remained. Whenever something can’t be found on the floor, the customer’s eyes well up with enough hope to fuel twenty Obama campaigns and ask, “Could you check in the backroom?” In their minds, they are prepared for the retail clerk to smack their forehead and say something along the lines of, “Yes! The backroom! How could have I been so foolish?!” and then proceed to skip off towards that room and arrive back with the item in hand seven to twelve seconds later.

Well, after working at all of the above places, plus a local used CD store, I can safely say that this room does not exist. If there is a backroom at all, it likely has items like employee jackets and backpacks that are not for sale (and too cheap to be worth selling in the first place). The few times there is product, it’s overstock (i.e., the 600 extra copies of every Norah Jones album since Come Away With Me), defects (i.e., the item you want already bought, broken, and returned by someone else), or random freak things (i.e., my old music manager’s stash of “Amy Winehouse Death Watch” CDs -- alas, he was about three years ahead of his time).

That’s about it. The fact is that most retail stores keep everything they have on the sales floor. Otherwise it would be like going to an Eric Clapton show and having him play only songs off his new record. (Which, I’ve actually seen and it ain’t pretty -- I’m lookin’ at you, Pilgrim tour.)

2. Your Child/Grandchild’s Brilliance

Most people shutter when they have to work in the kids department because (a) they hate kids, (b) they hate kids’ products, (c) they hate picking up other peoples’ messes, or (d) they hate picking up other peoples’ messes of hated products that were designed for an age group they hate. As you probably guessed, for most people it’s because of choice (d).

Well, I’d like to offer my own reason for why I shutter when I have to work in a kids’ department: The inability of the child’s parent or grandparent to base their minds in a reality that lines up with the one that everyone else lives in.

It usually happens like this: They say, “I’m looking for a book for my son/grandson.” You say, “Great, how old are they?” And then, almost without fail, they answer with pride: “Well, he’s six, but he reads like a 37-year-old. The teacher says he’s very advanced for his age.” Whenever I hear this, my mind instantly rockets to a fantasy in which I am standing at a huge podium where seated before me is every parent and grandparent in the world. I ask the crowd, “How bright is your children and grandchildren?” And then I fold my arms and watch with sly satisfaction as they all answer without fail and at the same time, “The teacher says he’s very advanced for his age…” before their words trail off in the surprise echo surrounding them that triggers the unimaginable realization that every teacher says this about every kid.

Meanwhile, I do my best to help the customer in front of me as best I can. “Well, if your child is five but reads like an eighth grader, you should just go to the regular adult fiction section, because that’s what most eighth graders read.” Or, I just take them to the Shakespeare section and ask if their kindergartener is more of an Othello or an As You Like It man. They should probably wait and tackle the violent stuff like Titus Andronicus or the brainy stuff like King Lear until they’ve at the very least learned about fractions.

3. Just Because You’re into It, Doesn’t Mean the Rest of the World Is.

Here’s something that happens every day: A customer bounds in and says: “Do you have that book [insert partially correct title here]? It was on [insert generic daytime talk show here]. You must have it. Eeeeeverybody is buying it!”

If this is their pitch, chances are good that at least one of these three (if not all) are wrong. People have the crazy notion that just because they read about something on a random page in a newspaper, everyone must’ve heard about it and are clamoring it up. This is almost never true. In fact, sometimes I’m least happy when I can find the book for the customer and they see one of two sad copies that have been sitting in section untouched since they came in on their release day. In that situation, the customer has a wakeup call that causes them to question the world in which they live: “Well, why don’t you have more? And why aren’t they out in front? Isn’t everyone asking for this?”

It’s hard not to tell the customer the truth, especially when the book is something like I Saw Nothing: The Kato Kaelin Story or Lean on Me: A Detailed History of the Household Wall. Actually, I take that back. It’s very, very easy to tell the customer the truth, even though it’ll cost you about twenty more minutes in Purgatory.

* * *

So, if you can just keep these concepts in place, chances are you will be doing better than 95% of the people who walk through the front door of my store. However, that’s not to say that even when these peeves are cured, there won’t be other ones forming down the line like new strains of diseases once the antidote has been found.

But I’d risk it to say that if these peeves are corrected, it will at least bring the conventional wisdom level out of the Middle Ages and into that of the Early Renaissance. There may not be three-point perspective yet, but at least they’re beginning to tilt the halos.

I’m Sorry, But You Must Be Stopped Immediately. (An Open Letter to Nicholas Cage)

2011-11-07T19:18:00.004-05:00

Dear Mr. Cage,

I know that you’re a huge Elvis fan, and so am I.

You have probably heard that story (I believe I read it in the 1999 30^th anniversary edition of Elvis’s post-comeback studio recordings, Suspicious Minds: The Memphis 1969 Anthology) where Chips Moman, the producer with whom Elvis would collaborate on the sessions, was trying to get through to Elvis just how out-of-touch he was, having spent the Age of Aquarius shuttling back and forth between Graceland and Hollywood, surrounded only by a crew of hanger-ons and lackeys who did little more than sit around and worship him.

The story goes that for some reason or another, Chips wants Elvis to go outside with him when they were meeting for the first time in California. Elvis tells him, no way, I’m the biggest star in the world and I’m just gonna get mobbed. Chips is able to finally convince Elvis to try it and the two men walk down the street in late-’60s Los Angeles. And Elvis is shocked at the fact that not only is he not mobbed, but that no one seems to even notice him.

The upshot was that Elvis sobered up (at least momentarily) enough to reassess his situation and work with Chips, who was pretty much the only producer of his mature career to challenge him on material and performance. In so doing, Elvis made the finest studio recordings of his life.

I relate this rock and roll version of The Emperor’s New Clothes because I fear that you are in a similar situation that Elvis was in in the late 1960s, and I fear that you may be surrounded by yes men and hanger-ons who don’t know or don’t care about the work you’re doing.

What follows is a manifesto of what one potential fan of yours would like to tell you:

1. You are 47 years old. There is no reason why you should be making action movies that would make Shia Labeouf look immature.

2. Your hot costars are young enough to be your children. Drop-dead blonde 20-somethings don’t fall for 47-year-olds, unless you are rich and can potentially be used to gain recognition, either financial or otherwise…Oh, wait, I see. Still, it doesn’t make it comfortable to watch.

3. People who talk like David Schwimmer don’t make realistic action stars. If you talked like Matt LeBlanc, there’d be no problem here. I think I could even work something out if you talked like Matthew Perry. But Schwimmer? You’d be better off if you talked like Courteney Cox.

4. You have an Oscar. Use it for something other than rubbing your back after a hard day of injuring yourself with stunts that mostly had to be done by a double anyway.

5. Return to your roots (and I don’t mean hairplugs). Accept the fact that as time moves forward, your film returns diminish. You cut your teeth on indie/outsider stuff like Birdy and Raising Arizona before breaking through artistically with Leaving Las Vegas. But then, you had one great action film (The Rock, although the Criterionites are still almost as pissed it’s #108 as they are that Armageddon is #40, but I digress) and one decent action film (Face/Off) before the long, sad slide into one generic blob of loud and crashy dreck.

6. Finally -- and this one’s probably going to hurt -- you should never play Superman EVER. EVER. EVER. You playing Superman would be like the equivalent of Steve Buscemi waking up one day and telling his agent, “Hey, I think I should play Mr. Darcy in a remake of Pride and Prejudice.” Or Sylvester Stallone deciding to direct and star in a remake of Hamlet. Or Bob Dylan convincing his label to record him crooning Bing Crosby-style Christmas standards. (Oops, scratch that last one…But you get the picture.)

I hope I’m not totally being totally disrespectful of your career or your talent. Please understand that this comes out of a deep respect for these things. I loved you in Birdy, thought you were charming in Moonstruck, and that The Rock was a lot of fun. Heck, I’ll even take 2,000 Miles from Graceland over your current work.

Which brings us back to the King. What I’m hoping is that, like Elvis getting his hard-to-take-but-much-needed wakeup call from Chips Moman, you too can take this advice and prosper into a late-period career worthy of comeback kids and late bloomers like Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray. Heck, you still have a chance to win a second Oscar before Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise land their first. But time is always of the essence.

And as I already mentioned, you are 47 years old. If you were Elvis, you would’ve been dead five years ago.

Regards,

Eric.

The Slickest Thing I’ve Ever Said (A Daylight Savings True Story)

2011-11-06T14:47:00.004-05:00

I hate Halloween. Maybe it’s because I was born on Christmas, maybe it’s because I hate clowns, maybe it’s because I was always nervous around kid-centered social activities, but it was a day I never liked. It probably just boils down to my hatred of people wearing makeup, something that has made me one of the few people I know who is consistently unimpressed by The Wizard of Oz. (I think the movie sucks when it goes into color; I always want to see more of what happens in the black-and-white world.)

At any rate, I often avoided trick-or-treating when I was younger, preferring to stay home, watch television with my parents, and answer the door when trick-or-treaters came by. Sometimes I’d even dress in a “low maintenance” costume (usually a Boston Red Sox player) in case any of my classmates came to the door, so that I could play it off like I had already gone out and was now home. Hence, trick-or-treating was usually avoided; Halloween parties were out the question.

This put me in a strange spot a decade later when a few of my closest college friends were throwing a Daylight Savings party. They originally wanted to throw a Halloween party, but an overlapping group of friends were already planning what was going to be the definitive one of the season. My friend Adam realized that Daylight Savings was happening a few days before Halloween that year and told everyone: “It’s a Daylight Savings party, but you’re encouraged to wear your Halloween costume.” It was a stroke of genius: No toes stepped on, no party spirit lost.

It made me think of my favorite episode of the most underrated television show perhaps ever, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which had a short run in the ’90s on Nickelodeon. The show always had a surreal bent that separated it from anything else on the channel (let alone the fluff that they played on Disney), which in hindsight feels like a precursor to shows like Community and movies by Wes Anderson.

At any rate, they were the only show I’m aware of to do a Daylight Savings episode. In it, Little Pete decides he hates Daylight Savings and wants to fight against it, so he bicycles across the time zones of the country, racking up the extra hours gained in each. Meanwhile, Big Pete goes on a date with his best friend Ellen, only to have it turn disastrous when he tries to cross the line from friendship to romance. After regretting his actions, Big Pete and Ellen realize that Daylight Savings has given them an extra hour, in which they can redo their failed date and bring their relationship back to friendship.

So, suffice to say that the notion of a Daylight Savings party, even one in which you were encouraged to wear your Halloween costume, intrigued me. I had never been to a Daylight Savings party before.

I put on my college equivalent of a “low maintenance” costume: A tie-and-sweater vest-wearing Alex P. Keaton, complete with parted bangs and a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my arm. I am pleased to report that my costume proved so successful (this being an art party, where everybody usually stays in the costume), someone called me a baby-killer in the kitchen.

As I defended rightwing ideologies to leftwing extremists, I noticed my friend Katy (who hated “slutty” girl costumes and dressed like a cowboy) was getting drunker and drunker. When the party was winding down, a very intoxicated Katy (intoxiKaty?) was ready to make her way home. Even though she lived roughly a half an hour out of my way, I decided I was going to be a gentleman and help her navigate through the mean streets of suburban Pittsburgh, where many a lesser man has fallen prey to the well-lit winding sidewalks and charming front lawns. Through some brave combination of caution, diligence, and determination, I was able to get her home safely in one piece.

The next day, I ran into Katy in a computer lab. She had long since sobered-up and put together what had happened the night before. “Thanks for walking me home,” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I feel bad – you really didn’t have to walk so far out of your way.”

“It was a Daylight Savings party,” I told her. “I had an extra hour to use, so I used it to walk you home.”

She smiled and gave me a look as though I had just said the slickest thing I would ever say.

Which I just had.

Giving Something Ba[ra]ck.

2011-11-05T17:08:00.005-04:00

My wife & I just moved to Washington, D.C. -- the scenic Northeast Quadrant of Brookland, to be exact. So far it’s quite lovely. There’s no shortage of American flags or historical markers (or American flags on historical markers, or even, in the case of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a historical marker for an American flag, but I digress), which is just fine by me.

One bonus of moving to Washington was that we would be closer by all sorts of good people we haven’t been near in a while -- immediate family, high school friends, college friends, post-college quarter-life crisis-era friends, and more.

But there is one person in particular that I am very interested to be living closer to: My good friend who I’ll refer to as Barack O., to keep his identity private.

Did you ever have one of those friends who only ever contact you when they want something? Well, Barack O. is that person in my life. He emails me personally all the time asking me for money. Although I never respond, he still keeps emailing me just the same. Every now and then he throws in an invitation to dinner, but somehow it never seems to work out.

I hope that living near him will cause us to run into each other on the street. If and when we do, boy will he feel awkward! I’ll say, “Hey man, it’s me, your good friend Eric! I know you know who I am since you email me directly almost every day. Funny to run into you now…I was just about to grab a coffee, but I’m short on cash. Can you lend me some money? Any amount, no matter how small, would be greatly appreciated. Getting me coffee will help keep the terrible agenda of tiredness at bay at a time when it is most crucial for my body to remain on the right course. With your help, I know we can do this together. God bless America!”

If that doesn’t get at least a buck fifty out of him, I’m gonna strongly reconsider calling Barrack O. my friend in the first place.

Building iMerica

2011-08-28T11:37:00.003-04:00

There is a sense of size and grandeur that has always been central to the American mind – a land filled with an epic sense of vastness in both its physical (“From sea to shining sea”) as well as its mental (“All men are created equal”) identity. Part of the reason why people disagree upon a definitive American novel (my Huckleberry Finn could be your Moby Dick, or vice-versa, or both, or neither) or film (The Birth of a Citizen Gonewiththewindfather, anyone?) is because America is too large to fit into a 500-page book or 2-hour film.

Yet there is an inherently American identity that defies the vastness it thrives upon. I’ve been thinking a lot about this paradox as I’ve been mapping the terrain of my own personal epic adventure, setting up my iPhone. The fact that I’ve had it for well over half a year is irrelevant because what more is America than grand improvisation?

My goal, with equal parts love and obsession, is to strip America down to its bare essence and within the confines of a 14 GB iPhone, such that, the next time I ever get stranded on a desert island (with an outlet), I can keep the essence of America on my phone, and thus, keep it with me at all times. (And, of course, still have room for unrelated non-American things like my Beatles albums and the complete works of Shakespeare.)

I call my grand project iMerica.

What follows is a list of the core documents of my country-within-a-country, the essence of a City upon a Hill in 14 GBs or less.

Documents

The Historical Documents Ap, from StandardWorks. Covering over four centuries of American speeches, articles, court rulings, war papers, poems, and song lyrics, this ap will get you a basic all-in-one American desk reference; included are the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Articles of Confederation), as well as every presidential inaugural speech (including Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, one of the finest speeches ever given), and all of the other usual suspects (MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and the Emancipation Proclamation, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech and a complete copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”), as well as such light reading as the Mayflower Compact and the Federalist Papers. All this, and Nixon’s “Checkers” speech too!

Books

I can’t afford a Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) (the “TM” stands for “Too Much”), so I just downloaded the free Nook (TM) ap and some cheap B&N editions of some classic literature and turned my iPhone into a Great American Bookshelf. Minus the sexy Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) cover case, of course.

Nonfiction

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It’s said that if you were lucky enough to own books in the early 19^th Century, you owned two: One was the Bible and the other was this. A pioneering autobiography/self-help/history/memoir that defined the American character almost as soon as it appeared. So charming, fascinating, and inspiring, no one ever seems to notice that it ends years before the American Revolution even begins. (Or perhaps, like the Great Experiment that frames it, it remains unfinished.)

Essays and Poems, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Declaration of Independence of American intellectualism, and one of the finest philosophers the country would ever produce. Ever wonder what people did before they could watch movies with sophisticated story-telling or television shows with ensemble casts and overlapping story archs? Just open to one of Emerson’s essays and try to keep up. In its own way, it’s as thrilling as any Martin Scorsese movie or Law & Order episode you’ve ever seen.

Walden and Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau. A nineteenth-century Into the Wild, this is the writing of a man who escaped his country by the very tenets it was established upon – reinvention and independence – to break life down to its essence and redefine it for himself. Walden was the sprawling epic, while “Civil Disobedience” was the concise essay, two halves of a whole that reiterated one of the chief rallying cries of the Revolution: Don’t Tread on Me.

Fiction

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. An extended meditation on the depths of American obsession, as played out in a high-seas epic, and interspersed with the history of the whaling industry, c. 1850, for no apparent reason. Great God, where is the ship?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. A white boy and a black man go drifting down the Big Muddy on a raft, and the rest is history. (Or, perhaps, culture.)

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. A history of the Guilded Age disguised as a children’s fantasy book; with all due respect to Ms. Garland & Co., this was the original book that was better than the movie.

Poetry

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. Epic, brilliant, weird, and self-indulgent, Whitman stakes a claim for the American voice – a modern, unpredictable thing that can’t be held down by rhyme schemes, narratives, or anything more than a hip-yet-calculated whim.

The Collected Poems, by Emily Dickinson. Written in seclusion by a woman who spent most of her adult life self-exiled in her bedroom, she produced short, concise poetry that is among the finest ever penned; exploring love, loss, life, and death, her work was as universal as her existence was solitary.

The Essential Tales and Poems, by Edgar Allen Poe. A stunning look at the dark side of American life, which went on to influence everything from southern gothic writing to film noir and gangsta rap – all while inventing the detective novel.

Music

The Complete Hot Fives and Sevens, Louis Armstrong. If jazz music is America’s answer to classical, Louis Armstrong is its Mozart. As the first important soloist, Armstrong and his bandmates worked out not just how jazz should sound, but also how it should feel; the result is a joyful and exuberant music, knocked off in loose, late-night recording sessions that redefined freedom in music and music in freedom.

Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band, Duke Ellington. As the first great jazz composer, Duke Ellington was the ying to Louis Armstrong’s yang – his music was all about form and structure and organization. This incarnation of his band (named after bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster) is generally considered the finest big band ever assembled, and with cuts like “Take the A Train,” it’s easy to hear why.

Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday. A two-disc overview of Billie Holiday’s peak years at Columbia, where she literally reinvented how a vocalist could sound (not to mention what a vocalist could feel and be), twisting words and skirting the beat with a gardenia in her hair and a tear in her voice.

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Frank Sinatra. The cream of Frank Sinatra’s legendary collaborations with arranger Nelson Riddle, this is the Chairman of the Board at his mature, mid-’50s peak. Don’t believe the Sinatra hype? Just put on “You Make Me Feel So Young” and try not to swoon.

Legendary Country Singers, Hank Williams. The closest thing we’ve got to a single-disc retrospective of the king of modern country music; it’s hard to narrow it down to an hour when virtually every song he recorded was a classic. Consider this an overview, with nowhere to go but up.

King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson. So much has been written about Robert Johnson it has become impossible to separate the myth from the man. Did Johnson really sell his soul to the devil in return for a sudden proficiency in blues music? Maybe not, but it sure as hell sounds like he did…

Elvis at Sun, Elvis Presley. Elvis “invents” rock and roll music on “That’s All Right Mama” and nine other sides, amongst the finest in rock and roll. The remaining nine tracks are the surviving masters (and one alternate take) of his output at Sun; what it lacks in quantity is made up for its brilliance, influence, and vitality – this is music you literally can’t get tired of. Have you heard the news?

Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan. Beginning with the storming “Like a Rolling Stone” and closing with the epic “Desolation Row,” this is Bob Dylan’s finest hour, and he doesn’t miss a beat. He sings of lovers, trains, confusion, and friends in music that blurs the lines between rock and blues, country and folk, past and present, comedy and tragedy, life and death. When he sings of needing a dump truck to unload his head partway through the album, you take his word for it.

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen. On the Road remade into a hipster’s daydream with Elvis’s bravado, Dylan’s imagery, and Phil Spector’s production values, this was music that staked its claim to greatness through the act of mapping it out, music that tried very hard, and somehow still delivered on its own golden promise.

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash. I once decided that if America had a voice, it would sound like Johnny Cash. This is his finest hour, singing songs of love, home, prison, and death to a crowd that meets his fuel and fury every step of the way.

Live at the Apollo, James Brown. Rhythm and blues as redemption as the Godfather of Soul begs, borrows, and screams his way through another night on the uptown chitlin’ circuit.

I Never Loved a Man The Way I Loved You, Aretha Franklin. With the title track, the Queen of Soul took the fervor of the church and brought it into the bedroom; with the landmark “Respect,” she then brought it out into the streets.

Film

Citizen Kane.* The greatest film ever made. It’s everything they say it is and more, benchmark in filmmaking and production, and also a fascinating production that has barely aged since it was made. It succeeds where so many other films have failed because it understands that in America, success and failure exist back-to-back to each other, as opposed to on two separate planes.

[* – Citizen Kane will be on sale digitally for the first time on September 16; I am literally counting down the days until this occurs and being careful to leave ample room in my iPhone for when it does.]

King Kong. The greatest movie ever made. All big and spectacle, this paved the way for the great American tradition of the blockbuster – the granddaddy to Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Titanic and Avatar, and better than all of those movies without any of the Technicolor and not a single computer graphic in sight.

Television

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “That’s My Boy?” Until the “Sammy’s Visit” episode of All in the Family comes out digitally – the most perfect half-hour of television comedy if I’ve ever seen it – this will have to do. The finest of all the early family comedies, probably because it was also just as effective as an early workplace comedy, this episode is included here for its trailblazing surprise ending that unwittingly defuses two hundred years of racial strife in one glorious moment of comedy.

The Bible

The KJV Bible Ap, from Tecarta Bible. Okay, so this predates America, but you could’ve fooled me – from the moment America deemed itself a City upon a Hill, it used the Bible as its chief reference and touchstone, the passion play against which its national drama could unfold. Any lip service about separating church and state failed centuries ago to such an extent that we don’t notice how much religion is in our national rhetoric not because it isn’t there, but because we are long since numb to the fact that it is everywhere.

Alright, so that’s roughly four pages of American documents that can provide a basic skeleton for your own little iMerica. From there you can add to it what you wish; like the country it encapsulates, this is an improvisation powered by freedom and reinvention.

I know I for one am gonna be on the continual hunt for when or if iTunes ever releases “Steamboat Willie.”

Sound Treasoning: A Brief History of the Fall & Fall of Recorded Sound

2011-06-05T23:55:00.003-04:00

The music industry is dead. Hate to break it to you, but it is.

Actually “dead” is too easy a term to use here, one that sacrifices the forest for the trees. A better word to use would be “in transition.” In fact, I’m convinced that the closest thing the music industry has seen to its current state (or lack thereof) of the last ten to fifteen years was about a century earlier, when sound recording was reeking havoc on the sheet music industry. Think about it – until around the turn of the 20^th Century, the music industry was built around sheet music. If you wanted to listen to music, you made it yourself in your parlor. If you wanted to get some, there was a nineteenth century version of iTunes for your convenience: Song peddlers who came door-to-door, who would sit down at your piano and play “audio clips” of the songs you were interested in. You bought the ones you wanted, forgot the ones you didn’t. Sound familiar? (No pun intended, of course.)

Yessir, that was the good ol’ days of the music industry, back when Tin Pan Alley was a real place and the only digital recording around was the divots on a player-piano cylinder. But then along came the advent of sound recording – first wax cylinders, then coil cylinders, then circular discs (all of which was the BluRay vs. HD of its day…Remember HD? Or better yet BetaMaxx? Or the minidisc?).

I once had a professor who said the most radical invention in human history was the invention of recorded sound because it had absolutely no precedent. Motion pictures had photographs before them, which in turn had daguerreotypes. The telephone had the telegraph, and, um, people shouting really loud before that. Really tiny handheld devices had relatively small computers before them, which in turn had relatively enormous room-sized punch-card computers before them.

The point is that no one was trying to discover recorded sound while sitting under an apple tree or flying a kite during a lightning storm – Thomas Edison just sort of stumbled upon it while pursuing other seemingly important things that I can’t remember the details of now. But there it was. Sound vibrations captured in foil.

(My above-mentioned professor went so far as to claim that when introducing the first sound devices through nineteenth century informercials – that is, traveling around the country like a small medicine show – in which they would show the audience a live band behind one curtain and a cylinder player behind the other, the audience always picked the live band because they had no concept of sound existing any other way; even though the record was scratchy and flat to our ears, for them sound was sound.)

At any rate, this all sent the sheet music people up in arms over what “really” constituted music and who owned it. In truth, however, it was just the thing that made music so awesome – that it was an invisible, instantly fleeting experience – was also making it very hard to make a buck off of. But as what always happens in our country, an industry sprang up relatively quickly around it, which was strong and powerful for over a century.

Until these days. Once again, music’s etherealness is doing in the big dogs and for over a decade now, we have Chuck D on one side arguing for the music’s freedom and Lars Ulrich on the other arguing for artist’s rights, kids are having hard-drives full of pirated music being confiscated by the law, the idea of a “record label” has shifted so much that a once iron-clad reality has become an experimental liquid.

All of which is not necessarily a bad thing. America is nothing if not a country whose very ideals – freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of all that Declaration of Independence stuff that everyone assumes is in the Constitution (it isn’t) – forces it to constantly question, challenge, reinvent, and adapt. Why shouldn’t our music do the same?

Which finds us in a very odd predicament. The history of recorded sound is nothing if not using sound to make a bigger and larger statement – hence, the one-sided disc gave way to the two-sided disk, which in turn gave way to the multi-record album (so named because it was made up of several record sleeves bound together, not all that different in size and feel of an old photo album), which in turn gave way to the LP (about 20 minutes on each side) to the cassette tape (about 45 minutes on each side) to the CD (80 minutes of glorious, digital sound).

The recent trends in the music industry (or lack thereof) appear to be refocusing things on the single, the A-side, the hit. The albums that had stopped being physical albums around the time that the Greatest Generation were first taking advantage of the G.I. Bill were now being used by their grandchildren in the most abstract of terms: “I’m gonna buy this album on iTunes.”

Or more accurately, “I’m gonna find a copy of this album online and download it.”

Given the amount of sound that can be packed into a modern listening device – and if my collection can be considered an accurate representation, I have three and half days of music on my iPhone and over a month and a half of music on my iTunes – coupled with the ease of sharing that accompanies digital technology, we have an entire generation hoarding music, the majority of which they will likely never listen to.

What we have then is a camera obscura of the observation that began this piece. Perhaps things aren’t going back to the single song so much as people now have the capabilities of gathering lots and lots of albums’ worth of material, thus making it a sort of radioactive freak stepchild of the progression from the single to the album to the cassette tape to the CD. For, in downloading song after song by itself, aren’t we just ultimately gathering a library far beyond what could be held in a 200-disc Case Logic book, or perhaps, even a shelf-lined living room?

If this strikes me as natural, it also strikes me as very American. The history of this country was built upon the notion of Manifest Destiny, that is, the idea that the land is bound to be ours, so we might as well grab it now. It is of course a self-fulfilled prophecy built upon the same logic that drove MacBeth (and we all know how that turned out), but it is also an intrinsic reflection of our national character. Namely, I see it, I should have it, I will have it. Isn’t that the story of America in three phrases or less? If so, the whole thing seems closer to the myth of Icarus than anything to flow out of William Faulkner’s pen.

And if rock and roll is a quintessentially American artifact (which I believe it is) on the same level as the cotton gin, Coca-Cola, and Superman, it only goes to show that its postmodern incarnation is still playing out the same battles that we thought were long resolved when we mis-learned the story of Custer’s Last Stand.

Or even better, go find a copy of Larry Verne’s “Please Mr. Custer,” a stupid novelty hit that topped the charts the same year that JFK took office (it also made #9 on the R&B charts, if you can imagine that), and download it illegally. This is precisely what I thought I had done when I went through a novelty song kick last year (pick to click: Johnny Cymbal’s cover of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” theory in the form of “Mr. Bass Man”), only except that it’s not there among the 20,773 songs in my iTunes library.

Apparently a bigger facet of the American identity was in fact driving the day: The freedom of choice.

Either that, or Verne’s song – an intangible, ever-fleeting digital indicator of how far technology (and, I would argue, America) could go before turning back on itself – sucked no matter how it was played.

American Madness, American Beauty: Yvette Vickers, 1928 – ???

2011-05-28T21:59:00.003-04:00

When I can’t sleep at night, I often peruse the obituaries. I am fascinated by the lives of these famous, infamous, and anonymous people, who I would have never heard about except in death. As a postmodern romantic who wants to keep the flame of their memory alive, I do what anyone in my situation would do: I post the obit to my Facebook page. It’s gotten to the point where a friend dubbed me “The Grim Reaper of Facebook”; when I do miss an obit that people think are worthy, they post it to my page with a little note.

One such time was earlier this month, when a friend from Texas posted a link to my page with the message: “Did you hear about this?”

I had not. The link was to an obit in the “L.A. Times” with the picture of a ’50s blonde with a headline that was as gruesome as the girl was beautiful: “Mummified body of former Playboy playmate Yvette Vickers found in her Benedict Canyon home.”

This was the rare obit that didn’t announce that a person had died, but rather that a dead person had been found.

Vickers was already living as a recluse when a neighbor began to get concerned when she hadn’t seen or heard from Vickers in quite some time. When the neighbor noticed yellowed untouched mail in the mailbox and spider webs on the front door, she decided to investigate further. Climbing through a window, she made her way through an endless tangle of junk – boxes of clothes, newspapers, and letters that were strewn everywhere and made walking through the rooms nearly impossible. Eventually, the neighbor reached a room upstairs, where she found the body of Yvette Vickers so far gone that her body had mummified beyond the point of recognition.

The police estimated that Vickers had been there for upwards to a year.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 26, 1928, as Yvette Vedder, she changed her name, moved to California, and tried to become a Hollywood star. She could be ruthless – after appearing in a nationally-televised White Rain shampoo commercial in 1955, she divorced her first husband because she felt he was holding her back, even though he had just bought her the 1920s Benedict Canyon home in which her body was later found.

And though she spent her final days as a recluse, she spent her prime years bubbling under in 1950s Hollywood. She became one of the first Playboy playmates, a B-movie star who had appeared in the likes of “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” (as a mistress, not the 50-foot woman), and a would-be Hollywood socialite who had dated Cary Grant. After a string of television and small movie roles, it seems that her career got permanently off-track when a major role opposite Paul Newman in the 1963 film “Hud,” was left almost entirely on the cutting room floor. She spent the next decade doing sporadic television work until a B-movie buff discovered her in the ’90s and helped her go into the cult movie circuit, where she went to conventions autographing old pin-up pictures of herself.

But then, it seemed, something snapped. Maybe it was the shame and frustration of being reduced to the convention equivalent of a freak; maybe it was the alcohol she seemed to be drinking more and more; maybe it was genetics (her parents had also become very reclusive in their old age). Whatever it was, it did her in good, and for the rest of her life, she was rarely seen and hardly ever left the house. Apparently she became paranoid, spending her final days scrawling notes about people she believed were stalking her in the margins of the books in which she kept her recipes.

Yet, all of the initial articles I saw left out the thing for which Yvette Vickers can be most recognized for today: She is the laughing blonde who frustrates William Holden by tying up the telephone line in the party scene of “Sunset Boulevard.” Although uncredited, it was her first appearance in a film and, perhaps, something of a break.

Of course, she is only in the film for a few seconds because the rest of the film is focused on an entirely different lady, the delusional and aging silent screen star Norma Desmond, who is played by the aging silent screen star Gloria Swanson. The film creates a bizarre world of fourth wall Hollywood self-reference – when Desmond is watching old films of herself, they are real old films of Swanson; when she has her old friends over for bridge, they turn out to be an uncredited trio of real silent film stars, including, if you look sharply, an aging Buster Keaton.

In portraying Desmond’s histrionics in equally comic and tragic turns, “Sunset Boulevard” is the definitive romantic portrait of American madness. Here is a grand old star locked away in her old 1920s-era Hollywood mansion, a tireless performer living out her days in a performance that nobody sees.

I have often thought that “Sunset Boulevard” portrays the quintessential version of American madness: Someone cut off from the real America, who then creates their own country in their mind.

The real-life version of this can best be found in “Little” Eddie Bouvier’s bizarre “performance” in the legendary “Grey Gardens,” which documents Bouvier and her mother (Jackie O.’s first cousin and aunt, respectively) madly living in the filth and squalor of a dilapidated Hamptons beach home. But shades of this can also be found, I believe, in Brian Wilson’s lost “Smile” album, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and James Otis’s final years. As Perry Miller famously theorized about the Puritans, perhaps the quintessential American identity is one who goes on an errand into the wilderness, fails to rivet the world on his their own, and is forced to retreat into themselves.

Yvette Vickers is thus the most striking example of this I have come across yet – there she is, at the center of “Sunset Boulevard,” a stark portrait of American madness and failure that her brief appearance contrasts, a girl-next-door blonde beauty, bubbly and laughing into the telephone, oblivious to the rest of the film, oblivious to the fact that she would spend her final years all but living this film out.