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

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

Quips and Quotations (Gathering Moss Edition)

...just none of them were articulate on this intellectual level...I mean, they just didn't articulate on this level.

--Jann Wenner, when asked why there are no women or persons of color in his upcoming book of interviews with rock musicians.

It was this--the radical conventionality of Rolling Stone--that was Jann Wenner's most important innovation. When he stamped the whole package with a psychedelic logo designed by poster artist Rick Griffin--the curled ligatures and looping serifs unmistakable signifiers of dope-peddling head shops on Haight-Ashbury--he instantly legitimized and mainstreamed the underground.

Wenner had never been, exactly, a revolutionary. He wanted to overthrow the establishment by becoming the establishment. The establishment, meanwhile, wanted a taste of the new fame and glamour that Rolling Stone was charting.

Pincered between disco and punk, Wenner defaulted to what did sell: Hollywood celebrities and 1960s-era rock icons of the kind he had been putting on the cover since 1967.

Wenner's biases and machinations--his success--had made him the gatekeeper of the history of rock and roll. And the next step was to build an institution out of it--literally, an edifice--over which he could preside...he was fashioning himself into the architect of rock's shining city on the hill: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It was a man’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishized in it.

--Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

 

In the future the pantheon will be decentralized.

--Richard Brody

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 (Know the Brill Edition)

 

I wanted to write for Broadway.

--Lyricist Cynthia Weil, who with husband Barry Mann wrote over 80 songs that charted on the Billboard Top 100, and 25 or so that reached the Top 40, including this one that reached No. 1 in 1965:

As for wanting to write for the Great White Way, Weil at least got to write ABOUT the Great White Way, this song reaching No. 9 in 1963:

1940-2023

Quips and Quotations (Better Be Good to Her Edition)

 

 And I won’t stop until I get that respect. I may not ever get it completely, because my life has been too hard so far. But I’ve gotten a taste of what that respect is probably like, and I like it. I may not be able to get that class, because I didn’t act my life, I lived it. I am Tina Turner. I am raunchy. But I know I’m a lady and that deep inside of me there’s a craving for class. I know I’m accepted, but what I always wanted was the principal’s daughters’ world. And maybe that was my lesson in life...Maybe I had to learn something from wanting that and then not being able to have it.

--Tina Turner

  

1939-2023

Photo Finish (Everyday People Edition)

 

Then we saw the blanket--“Oh my lord, that’s us!”

--Nick Ercoline, unaware for an entire year until the album came out that photographer Burk Uzzle had snapped a picture of him and his girlfriend--later his wife--Bobbi at some point during the famous 1969 three-day music festival. Bobbi Ercoline, 73, died last week after a year-long illness. 

Quips and Quotations (Counterculture Coiffure Edition)

 

1941-2023

I come from a school of people, folk singers, and the tradition there is troubadours, and you're carrying a message. Admittedly, our job is partly just to make you boogie, just make you want to dance. Part of our job is to take you on a little voyage, tell you a story. But part of our job is to communicate the way a town crier did: It's 12:00 and all is well, or it's 11:30 and the whole Congress is sold. It's part of the job.

--David Crosby

Establishment bitch!

Quips and Quotations (What Hath Ben Franklin Wrought Edition)

 

1944-2023

I was interested in the electric guitar even before I knew the difference between electric and acoustic. The electric guitar seemed to be a totally fascinating plank of wood with knobs and switches on it. I just had to have one.

--Jeff Beck

Someone told me I should be proud tonight... But I'm not, because they kicked me out... They did... Fuck them!

--Jeff Beck, upon being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the rest of the Yardbirds.

 We have a love-hate relationship. He loves me and I hate him

--Jeff Beck, speech inducting Rod Stewart, who sang lead on "You Shook Me", into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

    

Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless.

--Jimmy Page

Quips and Quotations (Fleetwood Forget-Me-Not Edition)

I sang and played keyboard, so I was virtually a statue at the back of the stage. I’m not complaining about that; I enjoyed that role.

--Christine McVie

1943-2022

 

 

Vital Viewing (Through the Glasses Darkly Edition)

Pop singer Roy Orbison was born on this day in 1936. For someone whose public persona was that of a man of mystery, he was very open to giving interviews, and I had close to a dozen to choose from on YouTube. Here's the one I finally settled on, conducted amidst a 1972 tour of Australia: 

 The dark glasses. The black hair. The usually black wardrobe. The mournful singing. So much a part of the Orbison mystique. And it's tempting to say that...

 

...the tragedies to which the Aussie interviewer alluded was the key to the Orbison mystique. Until you find out it all came together before the bad stuff happened. Take the most famous part of the persona, the ebony spectacles. Orbison wasn't blind, but neither was his vision 20/20. According to the performer himself, he had left his regular glasses behind on a plane, and so had to go out onstage with a pair of prescription Wayfarer sunglasses. Afterwards, he decided to make it a regular thing. It hid his stage fright, and, well, it also hid the fact that he wasn't the handsomest man in the world. Orbison's hair, like Elvis Presley's, was brownish-blondish, and, again like Elvis, he died it jet-black so the top of his head wouldn't seem to disappear under the bright lights. The black clothes went with the black hair and black lenses. As for his choice of singing material, much of which he wrote or co-wrote himself, Orbison had grown up in Texas listening to country and western music, much of which was of the somebody-done-somebody-wrong variety. And he heard the blues, which in its rawest form is about experiencing, well, the blues. There's no evidence that he was ever exposed to opera, though his ethereal vocal style earned him the nickname The Caruso of Rock. Whatever the exposure, the voice itself he was born with, and it wasn't tragedy but another word that begins with a T that is the key to Orbison's mystique: talent.  

OK, enough with the achy, breaky heart. How about something a little more upbeat? 

Listening to the lyrics and watching the grainy images, it occurs to me that by today's standards, this could be a song about a stalker.

Of course, when it comes to stalking, Orbison has nothing on this guy.

The 1980s saw a revival of interest in Roy Orbison. He was even in a supergroup.

Orbison and Bruce Springsteen. Two generations of rockers. Looking at this picture it's tempting to say a torch is being passed. But not so fast...

December 1988. Just 52 years old. That's 11 years younger than Sammy Davis Jr (died 1990), 17 years younger than Tennessee Ernie Ford (died 1991), 17 years younger than Burl Ives (died 1995), 17 years younger than Howard Keel (died 2004), 17 years younger than Pete Seeger (died 2014), 18 years younger than Leonard Bernstein (died 1992), 19 years younger than Dean Martin (died 1995), 19 years younger than Robert Merrill (died 2004), 21 years younger than Frank Sinatra (died 1998), 28 years younger than Lionel Hampton (died 2002), 29 years younger than Cab Calloway (died 1994), 29 years younger than Gene Autry (died 1998), 33 years younger than Roy Acuff (died 1992), 33 years younger than Lawrence Welk (died 1992), and 48 years younger than Irving Berlin (died 1989.) That's NOT how you pass a torch!

However, as another rock star or cartoon bear or baseball player or somebody once said, it ain't over 'til it's over. Orbison had just completed a new album, Mystery Girl, a few weeks before his death. A song from that album, "You Got It", co-written with fellow Traveling Wilburys Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, rose to No. 9 in the US and No.3 in the UK. Here's the video:

Roy Orbison's personal losses were enormous. In the public sphere at least, he was able to give more freely. And he did

..............................................................................................................................................

1931-2020

It's probably in bad taste to refer to a death as a scheduling conflict, but it so happens that actor Robert Morse died right when I was putting the finishing touches on this post. I always liked him in whatever I saw him in, and even if his fame was at best relative, I wasn't about to pass up his passing. His career was mostly on Broadway, but one of those Broadway productions, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, was also a 1967 Hollywood movie, and the character of window washer-turned-chairman of the board J. Pierrepont Finch was for many years Morse's best-known role. As for Hollywood movies based on something other than Broadway productions, Morse had large parts in two minor classics of the 1960s, The Loved One, a satire of the cemetery business (both two-legged and four-legged), and the cameo-laden A Guide for the Married Man, in which he schools Walter Matthau on the fine art of adultery. In recent years, Morse became well-known all over again for playing senior advertising executive Bertrum Cooper in the highly regarded cable series Mad Men. Those of you who think I've seen every TV show ever made may be surprised to learn that I've never watched a single episode of Mad Men, but I have no problem believing Robert Morse was very good in it.