Quips and Quotations (Ivories That Tickle Edition)

 

1928-2025

I would listen to the radio and think, 'I can write a song as good as that,' and the problem is, they already have people who can write songs 'as good as that' so what do they need one more for? What is necessary is somebody that can write something different.

--Tom Lehrer

Quips and Quotations (Car Hop or Pop Shop Edition)

 

1937-2025

[The hit singles] were the least-artistic endeavor of my career. They were bubblegum songs. They were teenybopper songs. But I enjoy seeing the reaction of people when I do them.

--Connie Francis

 

(Currently an internet sensation 63 years after it was released--Kirk)

Quips and Quotations (Everybody's Learning How Edition)

 

1942-2025

I wasn't aware those early songs defined California so well until much later in my career. I certainly didn't set out to do it. I wasn't into surfing at all. My brother Dennis gave me all the jargon I needed to write the songs. He was the surfer and I was the songwriter.

--Brian Wilson

(Looks like surf's down--Kirk)

Different Folks

 

Time out for some old school DEI:

Sly Stone 1943-2025

This Day in History

 

Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897, the daughter of a coal and ice dealer who himself was the son of an emancipated slave, and a mother who had some college but never graduated and thus earned extra money caring for small children. Devout Christians, Marian's parents discovered their eldest daughter was an exceptionally talented vocalist when she started singing in the junior choir of the Union Baptist Church at the age of six. In fact, the whole church was impressed, impressed enough that when her father died from a head injury when she was 12, leaving the family without much in the way of disposable income, the whole congregation raised enough money for Marian to train with a succession of musical teachers. Eventually, Marian came to the attention of the acclaimed music teacher Giuseppe Boghetti, whose students included soon-to-be acclaimed opera singers Jan Peerce and Helen Traubel. An even bigger break came when Marian won a singing competition sponsored by the New York Philharmonic and got to perform with the orchestra, a performance that finally won her acclaim from critics and audiences alike. In 1928, she gave her first performance in Carnegie Hall. A highly successful European tour followed. Then a successful one right here in the United States, followed by several more successful tours both here and abroad. The acclaimed conductor Arturo Toscanini told the now-acclaimed granddaughter of a slave that she had a voice "heard once in 100 years."

Only in America.

Given all the acclaim, you'd think Marian could sidestep the racist attitudes of the 1930s. She couldn't. Like other black performers, no matter how popular, she was turned away by some hotels and restaurants. In fact, she ultimately couldn't even sidestep the venue in which she had earned all her acclaim and popularity: the concert hall. Starting in 1930 and up until the opening of The Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts in 1971, Constitutional Hall was Washington D.C.'s principal showcase for touring classical music soloists and orchestras, as well as the home to the National Symphony Orchestra. Sounds like a perfect fit for the once-in-a-hundred-years contralto. Except the Hall was owned and operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, which at the time had a Whites Only policy. Even if there hadn't been such a policy, Marian couldn't have performed there, as there weren't separate White and Black rest rooms as dictated by District of Columbia law. You see, back then the nation's capital was a segregated capital. Home rule was still many years away, Congress called the shots, and that Congress had its share of Southern Democrats who wanted to enjoy the same benefits of Jim Crow law that they enjoyed in their districts back home. As for those congressmen from outside the South, they didn't seem all that bothered by the segregation, either. 

Only in America.

The DAR refusal did not go unnoticed. Members of the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the American Federation of Labor formed the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee. Finally, some Northern Democrats decided to take action, most prominent among them Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation's First Lady, herself a DAR member, until she decided to resign in protest. Roosevelt persuaded her husband Franklin to persuade Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to allow Marian Anderson to give an open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939, Easter Sunday.

Only in America.

Watch: 

Well, that was then, and this is now. Under the present circumstances, you'd think they let a black woman, no matter how acclaimed, sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? Nah. Too DEI. As for the song she sung in the above clip, might the line "sweet land of liberty" also soon come to be seen as too DEI?

Only time, in America, will tell.

Quips and Quotations (I Heard She Sang a Good Song Edition)

 

1937-2025

To be moved, to be moved constantly by your own songs. You need it to be in tune with them, and I don’t mean in tune musically, but I mean in tune with the lyrics of the songs, with the words of the songs, and with the meaning. You need to be in tune with all of that, and that takes a little bit of doing.

--Roberta Flack

Vital Viewing (Cat Scratch Fever Edition)

 

Girl-next-door type Eartha Kitt was born on this day in 1927 (she died in 2008.) Homespun innocence and decorous behavior both are on full display in the following clip:

See what I mean by homespun innocence? But enough about the interviewer. In the second video, Eartha pretty much repeats what she said in the first video, but this time to musical accompaniment:

HOO-HAH! I'll take her brand of evil over that of a tycoon's, or tycoons', any day of the week (and, in particular, this coming Monday.)

Vital Viewing (Twangbanger Edition)

1938-2024

Guitarist Duane Eddy became an early rock and roll star solely on the strength of his electrifying guitar instrumentals. As Eddy himself once said "One of my biggest contributions to the music business was not singing."

He wasn't much of a talker either:

 In the above interview, Eddy mentions a big swordfish he had caught, but I bet it wasn't as big as the one caught by...

...Jerry Lewis.

But I digress. Here's one of Eddy's biggest hits:

Eddy came out with "Rebel-Rouser" in 1958, yet the above video looks like it's from about ten years later, if that one girl whose hair is dancing as much as her feet is any indication. Shows you just how well Eddy's sound fit into a musical era quite different from the one in which he emerged. I mean, I can't imagine Bill Haley or Carl Perkins in such a raucous 1960s setting.

Composer Henry Mancini fit in with both the 1950s and 1960s, mainly because his audience wasn't composed primarily of teenagers. After all, parents were still spending money on records, if not quite as much money as were their kids. Yet as someone whose music would one day be categorized as "easy-listening", Mancini was one of the more forward-looking composers of his era. No more so than when he came up with the opening jazz-and-rock-tinged theme to the 1950s TV detective show Peter Gunn. Duane Eddy must have taken notice, as he recorded his own version in 1960 that charted at #27. However, the story doesn't end there. In 1986, he re-recorded the song with the British alternative synth-pop band Art of Noise, and that version was a worldwide hit. Watch and listen as Eddy and his advant-garde friends perform the Gunn theme in front of a live audience in Nashville:

Noir rocks!

Quips and Quotations (What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas Edition)

 

We experienced music in the same visceral way. Music ignited a fiery pent-up passion inside Elvis and inside me. It was an odd, embarrassing, funny, inspiring, and wonderful sensation. We looked at each other move and saw virtual mirror images. When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel.

--Ann-Margret

Elvis Presley confided in me soon after he did Viva Las Vegas with Ann-Margret that he was considering marrying her. I'm not implying that anything untoward ever occurred between them, but they had marvelous chemistry. But soon after that, I think he might have had it read to him from a review, he heard Ann-Margret described as "a female Elvis," and Elvis reacted negatively. To his mind, it was vaguely homosexual! Whether that's what cooled his feelings for Ann-Margret or not, I don't know.

--Bobby Darin

An Officer and a Gentle Man

 

1936-2024

Lou Gossett Jr was a film and T actor who I usually felt was better, sometimes a lot better, than the film or TV productions themselves. For instance, take the movie that won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, from which this post derives its title. Gossett was great in that, but I didn't really care for the thing as a whole. Or even understand it. Like, I never got what the climatic fight between Gossett's character, a drill instructor, and Richard Gere's Navy Aviation Officer Candidate was all about. When I asked people who also had seen the movie if they knew, the reply was usually something along the lines of "Richard Gere was immature and needed to be taught a lesson." Oh, so it's a basic training version of a spanking (though this time the misbehaving child gets a few good licks in himself.) Really, Gere's character comes across most of the time as nothing more than a smart ass, of which there's a great many in this world, but because it's the military, that smart assness becomes a potential threat to national security. Whatever. Besides, I think the steamy sex scenes between him and Debra Winger (proof at least of Gere's physical maturity) had as much to do with the film's great success as did anything it had to say about honor or duty.

Enough of Gere. We're here to talk about Louis Gossett Jr. Here he is alongside Eddie Murphy:

What's ironic about the above clip is that Gossett indeed would become stereotyped, but not the way the Saturday Night Live skit suggests. Remember, he didn't win that Oscar playing a ghetto father but a military man, and for a while there...

...he continued playing military men.

Praise the Lord (after all, tomorrow's Easter) and pass the ammunition. I actually prefer this kind of nonsense to the supposedly more profound An Officer and a Gentleman. Or maybe I should say I preferred, past tense. Watching this clip this time, I find the nonsense tries my patience more than it used to. A war movie can be very exciting, but now with the real-life war (or horror) movies going on in the Ukraine and the Middle East, and here in the United States the undeclared wars against innocent bystanders that break out every time somebody walks into a shopping mall, school yard, or Super Bowl celebration armed to the gills, that excitement quickly turns into nausea. None of this is meant as a dig against Louis Gossett Jr. Like most of us, he just went where the work was. And there were times when that work worked toward peaceful ends.

Gossett started on the stage and appeared on Broadway alongside Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in A Raisin in the Sun (a work that was equal to his talent) and was in the film version as well. Did you know Gossett could sing? He was in the Broadway musical The Zulu & the Zayda with Ossie Davis and a Yiddish theatre actor by the name of Menasha Skulnik. Former MGM mogul Dore Schary directed. I confess to never having heard of this production until now, but it must have been good as it ran for 179 performances. In addition to singing on the stage, Gossett for a time had a side career in folk music. In 1967 (when a war movie titled Vietnam looked as it might never get to the closing credits) Gossett covered the oft recorded "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and his somewhat soulful rendition holds its own nicely to the better-known versions by The Kingston Trio and Johnny Rivers. Listen:

May your Easter be a happy and thoroughly unexciting one. 

 

 

Vital Viewing (Hitsville's Hamlet Edition)

 

Motown Records founder Barry Gordy was born on this day in 1929. One of the most successful music industry execs ever, you'd think a man with such a golden ear would be sure of a sure thing when he heard one. As it turns out, just like the rest of us, Gordy could be plagued with doubts, and often equivocated when it came time to sign a future living legend, as he admits in this 2013 interview with British talk show host Jonathan Ross:

  

Yes, that's Richard Gere to the right of Gordy, and, further down on the couch, Jack Black. The young woman sitting in between Gere and Black obviously needs no introduction.

Now back to Gordy, who in 1963 was so unsure of Stevie Wonder's potential that before signing him he made the child take a...

...test, the results of which revealed young Stevie to be a...

...genius!

OK, so maybe it didn't happen quite that way, but the young lad was more than talented enough, as you'll see in the following ancient videotape:

I don't know about you, but those numbers running in the lower left corner are making me nervous! Let me get my smelling salts.

OK, I'm better now. Onto The Jackson 5, the success of which in 1970 was so much in doubt that in the likelihood they failed, Gordy would need a...

...fall guy.

So? Were they a bust? You decide:

I'll decide. The kids remained gainfully employed. For that matter, so did Miss Ross.

 

Of course, if Stevie Wonder or The Jackson 5 were just starting out today, they would have their very own YouTube channels, and be able to bypass Barry Gordy and his handwringing entirely. 

Lastly...

  

Roisin Conaty, a British comedienne, in the off chance she did need an introduction.

 

Quips and Quotations (Nowhere to Go but Up Edition)

 

...the perception of the song's meaning got a little bit changed for a lot of people. It's a very spiritual song. 'Dream Weaver' is really a song whose lyrical content is about the consciousness of the Universe: God moving us through the night – delusion and suffering – into the Higher Realms

--Gary Wright

1943-2023

Vital Viewing (Gulf Coasting Edition)

 

1946-2023

Soft rock? Folk rock? Country rock? Given the laid-back imagery his songs often evoked, a cynic might contend that Jimmy Buffett's musical specialty was in fact slacker rock, but that would be unfair.

 

Like the rest of us (above), Buffett worked hard for the money:

Whether it be eight hours in a factory, an office, or a recording studio, a person at the end of their shift feels pretty exhausted, at which point they could use some...

...PROTEIN!!!

And once your stomach is filled, there's nothing like a...

...little after-dinner drink:

How about a twelve-step program as an encore?

 

Next quarter maybe.

Let's let Buffett speak for himself:

As you just saw, the above clip had to do with a show in California, but that's not the state most readily identified with Jimmy Buffett. Nor was it his native Mississippi. Instead, it's this place:

OK, I know what you're thinking...

...but don't blame Buffett, a lifelong Democrat.

Vital Viewing (Pushing the Encycle Edition)

 

Remember this?

Sinead O'Connor's confession to Dr. Phil:

Now let's hear what one-time Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith has to say about the whole brouhaha:

Well, of course Smith is going to defend O'Connor. Those hedonistic show biz types all stick together. But what about the damage done to the Roman Catholic Church?

It somehow survived.

In fact, at times the Roman Catholic Church's survival skills are damn near miraculous.

But back to Sinead:

She could have been singing about herself.

1966-2023

Quips and Quotations (The Comeback Crooner Edition)

 

1926-2023

My goal as a creative person is to express truth and beauty in whatever I do.

--Tony Bennett  

 

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.

--Frank Sinatra

I realized that young people had never heard those songs. Cole Porter, Gershwin—they were like, 'Who wrote that?' To them, it was different. If you're different, you stand out.

--Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett has not just bridged the generation gap, he has demolished it. He has solidly connected with a younger crowd weaned on rock. And there have been no compromises.

--The New York Times

 

I walked in and said, ''Well, Tony, here we are,'' and I dropped my robe, and I got into position. I felt shy and thought, ''It’s Tony Bennett. Why am I naked?''

--Lady Gaga. Done in conjunction with an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Vanity Fair (in which Gaga also appeared nude,) the charcoal drawing by "Benedetto" (Tony's birth name), eventually netted $30K at an auction, the proceeds going to two different charities, Gaga's Born This Way Foundation and Bennett's Exploring the Arts Foundation.

Of course, the drawing was hardly Bennett's and Gaga's only, or, for that matter, most well-known, collaboration....

She's America's answer to Picasso.

--Tony Bennett

I don’t know if I’m the new Picasso but I’m certainly twisted like his paintings.

--Lady Gaga

Tony called me Lady, but he talked to Stefani. The little girl in me that loved jazz sang with Tony Bennett. I know he called me Lady, but I know who his singing partner was: It was that little girl who loved jazz.

--Stefani Germanotta, aka, Lady Gaga