The summer of 1969 was the summer of rock music festivals. In many ways these were an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of 1967's "Summer of Love" in San Francisco--and more particularly, the "Be-In" that occurred in that city's Golden Gate Park one day in January of that year. Yes, already by 1969 the counter culture was awash in nostalgia. The pinnacle was at Woodstock that August, but things would become seriously unhinged later that year at the Rolling Stones' one day event at Altamont. (I almost went to the latter, but I was sick that weekend. And I had a lot of homework to do.)
In Toronto, at the end of the summer of '69, things were a little different. It was a one-day affair, as opposed to the 2 or 3 day festivals that were the norm, and it was planned to be a celebration of the roots of rock n' roll. Consequently most of the acts were pioneers of rock, such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- with a smattering of newer acts, most prominent of which was the Doors.
Well, that lineup didn't entice ticket buyers in the summer of '69. Fearing the festival would collapse before it even began, the promoters invited the Beatles -- who were themselves on the verge of collapsing -- to make their first live appearance in 3 years. Needless to say, the Beatles, who had just recently spent their final days together in a recording studio, didn't show. But John Lennon did, and the concert was saved.
Since he hadn't been in front of an audience for such a long time, Lennon later admitted he spent the half hour before he took the stage nauseous in his dressing room. But his performance shows no sign of nervousness. In fact, he shows that he was one of the great rock vocalists. Bowing to the the nature of the event, he sang mostly only old rock n' roll chestnuts such as "Dizzy Miss Lizzie", with the able assistance of Eric Clapton's nimble, blistering lead guitar.
As for the rock pioneers, Jerry Lee Lewis, strangely enough, centered his set on Elvis Presley songs and not his own. Or maybe not so strange -- Presley had recently begun to return to live performances that summer in Las Vegas, and I can't help thinking "The Killer" was attempting his own style of one-upmanship. (His resentment of Presley culminated 7 years later with Jerry Lee showing up drunk late one night with a loaded pistol, at the gate of Elvis' Graceland mansion, ranting and raving. According to one witness, he said, "Tell him the Killer's here to see him" -- hardly assuring words coming from someone brandishing a gun. He was arrested at the scene.) As for Little Richard, he instantly revived his career at Toronto; as one observer noted, "in 30 frenetic minutes Little Richard had just made his comeback".
Here's Lennon's version of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie", Jerry Lee performing a manic "Hound Dog", and Little Richard -- with his terrifically tight band -- performing "Lucille" and making the original version sound like a dress rehearsal.
I just learned an entire book about "Bitter Tears", Johnny Cash's 1964 concept album that centered on the plight of Native Americans, came out a few years ago, with cover art by Shephard Fairey, the artist who did the famous Obama Hope poster. The story behind this album is captivating. As one writer says, "In 1963, Johnny Cash released one of the biggest hits of his career with the trumpeting, propulsive 'Ring of Fire'. But he followed up with his most obscure and controversial effort: the 1964 folk-protest album called “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.”
Here's a summary from Amazon:
"With his highly personal early 1960s work, Johnny Cash had been trying the patience of the Columbia brass, who were less than thrilled with his commercial performance. When "Ring of Fire" topped the country charts in 1963, it allowed him to continue the many ambitious concept albums-history lessons close to his heart. The eight songs on 1964's Bitter Tears are sung from the point of view of the American Indian (still the accepted term in 1964), and together they form a potent work that is both deeply real and highly spiritual. With assistance from co-composer Peter LaFarge, Cash offers an earnest, solemn portrait of Native Americans that examines a variety of issues through a range of viewpoints and contained in unadorned musical settings. Cash actually took out full-page ads daring radio programmers to play "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," but all of the material hits home, from LaFarge's defiant "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" to Johnny Horton's mournful, spooky "The Vanishing Race."
Here's "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" performed by Cash shortly after the album's release on Pete Seeger's public TV show. One note -- Cash was in the middle of drug addiction & is clearly stoned out of his head. I'm kind of surprised Seeger had him on the program in that condition -- but his show, Rainbow Quest, was usually populated by little-known folk singers, so Cash must have been quite a catch. And he does sing the song well & true.
After Johnny Cash cleaned up his act, here is another performance of the same song, with added lyrics, on his successful TV show. He sang it as part of a recurring segment of his program called "Ride This Train" -- within which Cash was now, on TV, giving "history lessons close to his heart". 6 years after the Seeger clip -- and looking 10 years younger -- Cash frames the song with an extensive prologue and epilog (containing a short version of "Ira Hayes"), creating a more searing indictment of the treatment of Native Americans.
It was Johnny Cash's birthday yesterday. Here is one of my favorite Youtube clips, filmed when he came out against the Vietnam war before a college audience in 1971. The students are respectful & quiet at the beginning, then erupt in applause as it's clear he's against the war. Note the smiling, yet tear-filled, woman near the end. As the old Irish ballad says, 'Johnny, we hardly knew ya'. He receives a standing ovation.
In 1986, 'the most famous Bob Dylan bootleg of all time' was released. Called Ten of Swords, it was a 10 album comprehensive compilation of Dylan's unreleased work from 1961 to 1966. Dylan bootlegs have always had a strong cache to collectors, since he has always had the peculiar habit of leaving some of his best work unreleased. Ten of Swords brought together unreleased songs that had been released on dozens of bootleg albums, and the quality of the recordings--usually pretty poor on previous bootlegs--was virtually up to the quality of official releases. Ten of Swords was, unfortunately, hard to find--and quite expensive, to boot. (No pun intended.)
Many years later, however, Ebay came to my rescue. I found copies (now on 7 CD's rather than 10 records) for a relatively nominal price--as Ralph Kramden might have put it, for "a mere bag of shells". So I bought it, popped the 7 CD's in my 10 disc CD player -- along with 3 of my other Dylan CD's -- opened a pint of Guinness, and sat down to listen. I hit 'play' on the remote...and nothing happened Absolutely nothing. I know that's redundant--but how else can I convey the frustration I felt that night? No matter what I did, my stereo just sat there, insolently glaring back at me.
Before hurling my pint of Guinness at it, I decided to calm down, take the CD's out & listen to them one at a time on the CD player in my computer. But not only was 'play' not working, but 'eject' wasn't either. Not only could I not listen to the CD's -- now I couldn't even get them out of the CD player. I spent that night with a screwdriver in my hand, trying to take apart the machine & retrieve my CD's. I never was able to take it apart. If I'd have had a baseball bat in the house that night, I know what I might have done.
The next night I talked to my older daughter and told her what had happened. She spent her childhood with Bob Dylan as part of the soundtrack of her life, and she knows more than most that he is an acquired taste. (I remember my first wife waking up one morning & telling me she'd just had a horrible nightmare -- she'd dreamed that Bob Dylan had moved in with us and wouldn't leave!)
When I told my daughter that I'd loaded up the CD player with 10 Dylan CD's, she thought that explained everything; after all these years being forced to play Dylan CD's, this was the final, last straw for my CD player. It just couldn't take it anymore.
So, I guess I can sort of understand why the CD player decided to go to that big stereo store in the sky. But why wouldn't it let me have my CD's back? Besides being suicidal, did it also have to be spiteful?
Back in the day, American popular songs often began with a prologue. Two of my favorite songs that employ that convention were both written in the 1920's, "If You Want a Rainbow (You Must Have the Rain)" and "What'll I Do". Here are two clips; first, Annette Hanshaw performs "Rainbow", which was released, of all things, on the "Diva" label. I first heard her music only recently, after I watched Nina Paley's multicultural phantasmagoria, Sita Sings the Blues, where her music provides the soundtrack to a vivid reinterpretation of the Ramayana. Hanshaw was only in her 30's when she performed a disappearing act & quit show business. The story goes that she was just tired of it. Her song not only has a prologue--it also ends with her trademark signature "That's All". And that's just what she said to her singing career.
The second clip is Harry Nilsson, from his 70's retro album of pop standards, performing Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do". Berlin wrote everything from "White Christmas" to "God Bless America", but of all his hundreds of songs, this is my favorite. Anyone hearing this song can probably guess that its writer must have been well-acquainted with heartbreak. Irving Berlin certainly was. His first wife died from an illness she contracted on their honeymoon. (His second marriage would last 63 years.)
One of our first nights out on the town after the birth of my firstborn, my wife and I went to a club in Berkeley to see Pearl Harbor & the Explosions, a New Wave/Punk group that was hot at the time. They had a song out called 'Drivin' that was a local hit in the Bay Area. It was sort of a theme song for me at the time, since I did a
lot of driving in my job.
We got great seats near the stage. The night soon turned strange. For some
reason, Pearl Harbor -- who at one time went by the stage name Pearl E. Gates -- began looking at me as she sang. I was pretty surprised & mystified by this. At one point I even looked behind me, to see if maybe there was someone she knew behind me. There was no one there. Her focus on me only increased as the night wore on.
My wife was at first annoyed by this, and then increasingly irritated -- when she wasn't away from our table, calling home to see how the baby was doing. (She'd do this about every 20 minutes.) She kept looking at me, accusingly, as if I was inviting this. I'd shrug my shoulders in response to her angry glances -- to no avail.
We drove home in silence. I tried bringing it up a few days later, jokingly, but that would only make her lapse into silence again.
I saw my now ex-wife a few months back at my son's wedding. We enjoyed talking to one another at the reception, but I think it's a good thing I didn't mention Pearl Harbor.
Here's Pearl Harbor singing 'Drivin' -- apparently from a cable access show in 1979 -- and then you can see her perform 'Fujiyama Mama', backed by The Clash. 'Fujiyama Mama' was a 1950's Rockabilly song, by Wanda Jackson--who has been dubbed both the Queen of Rock as well as the First Lady of Rockabilly. There's the Queen, with none other than the King, on the right, at the birth of their careers. In the midst of the Disco nightmare of the late 1970's, I loved how the New Wave/Punk movement revived the Rockabilly sound, like when Sid Vicious revived Eddie Cochran's 'Somethin' Else'. The final clip is the original 'Fujiyama Mama', sung by that spitfire Wanda Jackson. She's still rocking her tail off -- she played here in LA only a few months ago.
In Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special, there came a point where he had to address the fact that, after almost a decade of making bad movies, he'd been eclipsed by the Beatles and all that had come after them. By 1968 he was largely seen as an anachronism. He was all too aware of the shallowness of his movies -- he once said "the only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one".
But after bringing up the Beatles, he...changed the subject! He launched into a little lesson on the roots of Rock n' Roll, pointing out that it grew out of Gospel and Rhythm & Blues. It was an eye-opening revelation to me as I watched at home. Within days I bought a B.B. King record, which lead to a life-long interest in roots music. Here's that section of the Comeback Special, which was, to me -- as much as I enjoyed hearing him sing his old hits -- the heart and soul of the show.
When they were on the top of the charts, the Beach Boys played once a year in Reno. My older sister Wendy & I saw them at their peak at the State Building downtown. After the concert, she talked me into waiting with her to meet them as they walked out. It seemed like forever as we stood there in the cold Fall air. But finally they appeared. They walked past us hurriedly -- except for the lead singer Mike Love, who broke away from the pack, chatted with Wendy & then invited us to join him at a restaurant across the street. My sharpest memory of the night was his passing his unfinished Pie a la Mode to me.
After this encounter, and a long letter that Mike Love later wrote to my sister from Manhattan Beach --which I proudly showed off to my friends--an urban legend arose at my grade school that the song "Wendy", on the latest Beach Boys album at the time, was written for my sister. I knew the song came out before they met, but when I heard the rumor, I didn't disabuse anyone of the notion as it was passed around. It gave me what little notoriety I had.
However, on
the "Beach Boys Party" album, recorded after Wendy & Mike Love met, her name is
called out as they sing a their cover version of the song "There's No Other (Like My Baby)". It occurs at about the 2:20 point of the following clip. When I first heard this song, and the shout out to Wendy, I was stunned. I pointed it out to my friends, but they were deeply unimpressed. After all, they already thought she'd had an
entire song written about her! There's a moral in here somewhere.
OK Go's latest video was shot mere blocks away from where I live in Echo Park, at Echo Park Lake. And they gained a 5th, nonhuman, member in the process--a large, people-loving goose, well-known to those that hang out at the Lake (who have named her Maria).
Elvis loses it onstage, at the beginning of his comeback tour in 1969. Apparently he thought he'd really messed up--at the end, he says "That's it, man. 14 years right down the drain". (14 years earlier, he had his first his first hit records.) But this was in the days before Youtube, where every mistake by a celebrity goes viral.
Also, well put together slide show. The family portrait from when he was a baby is very stark and kind of alarming. Smiling seems to be the last thing on their minds. But then again, probably to be expected for a poverty ridden Southern family during the Depression, haunted by the death, at birth, of Elvis' twin brother. It looks as if it could have been taken by Dorothea Lange. I guess, judging by the smiles & laughter seen in this clip, he was making up for lost time.
