August 2015 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Music Throwback Saturday: Broken English

Marianne Faithfull has been constantly reinventing herself musically for over 50 years.

Near the end of the run of those Warner Brothers Loss Leaders I used to buy, the eclectic music went from TWO to THREE whole dollars for a double album (LP) set.

The Troublemakers collection in 1980, which proved to be the last iteration for over a decade, featured groups such as the Sex Pistols and Devo. As Dustbury put it, “This is as punk as Burbank would get.”

Here’s the description of one artist: “MARIANNE FAITHFULL may not be a new recording artist but what she’s up to these days is definitely not ‘As Tears Go By.'” She “remains very enigmatic, very British and very with it. The intensity of her Broken English LP is as unprecedented as it is surprising, and the record is every bit as good as its press makes it out to be.

Her Wikipedia article notes her music career, and her highly publicized romance with Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger. “She co-wrote ‘Sister Morphine’, which is featured on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album,” and even recorded it [LISTEN], but had a legal battle to keep the writing credit.

Graham Nash says his song Carrie Anne by The Hollies was about Faithfull and the Beatles’ 1966 song “And Your Bird Can Sing” from the Revolver album may have been written about her as well.

But the “hip Swinging London scene” she shared with Jagger had its definite downside:

She was found wearing only a fur rug by police executing a drug search at [Keith] Richards’ house in West Wittering, Sussex. In an interview 27 years later…, Faithfull discussed her wilder days and admitted that the…incident had ravaged her personal life: “It destroyed me. To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother”.

“Severe laryngitis, coupled with persistent drug abuse” in the early 1970s “permanently altered Faithfull’s voice, leaving it cracked and lower in pitch.”

The album Broken English, although not a massive commercial hit – #57 in the UK album charts and #82 in the US – was, as suggested, was critically acclaimed. Faithfull calls it “the masterpiece.”

Marianne Faithfull has been constantly reinventing herself musically for over 50 years. Despite some health issues, including breast cancer in 2006, she has persevered. “In September 2014, Faithfull released an album of all-new material, titled Give My Love to London.”

As Tears Go By (1964), the Jagger/Richards composition she recorded before the Rolling Stones did. It went to #9 in the UK, #22 in the US. LISTEN to it HERE (TV performance, introduced by Brian Epstein) or HERE (another TV show); rerecording HERE.

Now LISTEN to the title track from the album Broken English (1979) HERE or HERE (12″ long version).

Julian Bond in Binghamton

Being against the Vietnam conflict in 1965 was well ahead of the curve.

On October 15, 1969, there was a nationwide moratorium against the war in Vietnam, with hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country, and abroad.

My hometown of Binghamton, NY was one of over 300 locations across the country that hosted a moratorium event. Former mayor William P. Burns one of the speakers. But the featured address, right at City Hall, was given by Julian Bond. How he ended up in my sleepy little town of 70,000, I have no idea, because he, in both the civil rights and antiwar fields, was a rock star.
Bond helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, when he was 20, organizing voter registration drives, and leading protests against Jim Crow laws.

From the Wikipedia:

In 1965, Bond was one of eleven African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 had opened voter registration to blacks… On January 10, 1966, Georgia state representatives voted 184–12 not to seat him, because he had publicly endorsed SNCC’s policy regarding opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War…

A three-judge panel on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in a 2–1 decision that the Georgia House had not violated any of Bond’s constitutional rights. In 1966, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 9–0 in the case of Bond v. Floyd (385 U.S. 116) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and was required to seat him.

Being against the Vietnam conflict in 1965 was well ahead of the curve, long before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his April 1967 antiwar address, or when CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite deemed Vietnam a lost cause in February 1968. I well remember how Binghamton evolved on the war from when I entered high school in February 1968 – hostility towards those opposed to it – compared with a year later, when it was a whole lot easier.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, he was even nominated to be Vice President, though the 28-year-old was too young to serve.

So, Julian Bond, not yet 30, was a hero to a lot of us by the time he came to town. The picture here was taken by my friend Karen for the 1970 Binghamton Central High school yearbook, the Panorama. The gold version was what appeared in the book.

Bond and Morris Dees go on to found the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and later, Bond served as the head of the NAACP. But early on, I was in awe of Julian Bond. I was sad when he passed away this week.

Learn about the life and work of Julian Bond from the One Person, One Vote Project. See an interview with Bond about the FBI called “Their Goal Was to Crush Dissent” on the website Tracked in America. Bond is the author of Vietnam: An Anti-War Comic Book.

(Thanks to Alan David Doane for technical assistance.)

Your musical chronology

My single most important retrospective purchase was likely the Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974 box set.

Something Arthur said about Hurricane Smith turning him on to the Ink Spots reminded me that I, and I suspect most music fans, started listening to the recent items first. But eventually, we started looking backward, discovering the roots of the current tunes.

While I heard a lot of music in the house, starting in 1957, I think I wasn’t fully engaged until 1964, when the Beatles, Supremes, Temptations, and others charted in the US.

I was, and am, a person who reads the liner notes, or sometimes, back in the day, the actual record label, to find who wrote the songs. The early Beatles covered Carl Perkins, Little Richard, and early Motown, and that got me listening to the source material, especially Buddy Holly.

Groups such as Cream, the Rolling Stones, and later Led Zeppelin were covering blues artists, and that directed me back to Koko Taylor, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, and the like.

The movie American Graffiti and, to a lesser extent, Sha Na Na at Woodstock, got me interested in more music from the latter 1950s, and eventually segued into even earlier artists. In particular, I became fascinated with Frank Sinatra, whose swagger I found usually painful in the 1960s, but genuine a decade earlier.

While I was still getting new music in the 1980s, I found that I looked back as much as forward. My single most important retrospective purchase was likely the Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974 box set. While I had much, but not all, of the music from the last five or six years, I had almost nothing from earlier years. It was a revelation. (BTW, mine is 14 LPs rather than 8 CDs.)

Some of that early R&B was more jazz than rock, and that got me interested in 1950s jazz, and eventually earlier and later iterations.

This led me to some buying trends: getting more compilation albums (labels such as Stax, Motown, Buddah, ABC-Paramount, Cadence, and many others) and then buying albums from those collections that I liked.

I’ve ignored the impact of the music my parents played. My mother had Nat King Cole 78s, though she didn’t play them much. My father listened to Harry Belafonte, Odetta, and a bunch of folk music.

How did YOU get turned on to music that was released BEFORE you started listening?

Here are some songs to listen to, from that aforementioned Atlantic collection:

That Old Black Magic – Tiny Grimes

Drinkin’ Wine Spo-de-o-dee – Stick McGhee

One Mint Julep – The Clovers

Soul On Fire – LaVern Baker

Money Honey – The Drifters

Tipitina -Professor Longhair

Shake, Rattle and Roll – Big Joe Turner

Sh-Boom – The Chords

A Fool For You – Ray Charles

Smokey Joe’s Cafe – The Robins

Albany Public Library Hours Changing Sept. 1

I’m thrilled that three branches will be open Thursday night, instead of the whole system being shuttered.

Starting Tuesday, September 1, hours are changing at all APL locations. And it’s about time. One of the great frustrations with having a half dozen branches with identical hours is, if they had been staggered, one could easily traverse to another locale. Most are only a mile or two apart.

Presently, all the branches (except Washington Avenue, f/k/a Main) open the same 8 hours Monday-Wednesday, 6 hours Thursday and Friday, and 4 hours on Saturday. Next month, there will be some branches open during the range of 10 a.m.- 8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, and the non-Washington Ave branches will be accessible for five hours, rather than four on Saturday.

Washington Avenue will lose an hour in the morning, and one in the evening Monday through Wednesday; the morning I’ll miss, and I wonder if the downtown business community may as well. But I’m thrilled that three branches will be open Thursday night, instead of the whole system being shuttered.

The library director Scott C. Jarzombek, with whom I confer from time to time, notes: “We based the new schedules on feedback we got from customer surveys, community outreach, and by looking at the usage patterns at all branches. We are able to make this change with little to no effect on our budget. Our service area model, which pairs branches in three areas of the city, allows us to share staff and resources, and to save money.

“And remember, we’re always open online!”

What the Chuck

Chuckie’s is a not place this man will enter again.

Did this ever happen to you? You experience something, you suffer through it. But then another person crystallizes your feelings about it.

This took place recently. A friend of mine, who I’ll call Rachel, I first met 20 years ago. She wrote on Facebook recently about a dialogue between her husband (“Thor”) and her daughter (“Anna”).

Anna: Daddy, my birthday party is at Chuck E. Cheese this year!
Thor: Good luck with that. I don’t go to parties at Chuck E. Cheese.
Anna: But there will be pizza and games!
Thor: Anna, I wouldn’t go to Chuck E. Cheese if you were getting married there.

I practically applauded, as I responded: “I’ve been to no fewer than a half dozen CEC bday parties, none for MY daughter. BRUTAL. You should hire a nanny for the afternoon.” As Rachel had previously indicated the importance of quality time with her children, I was trying to suggest that Thor’s (totally justifiable) intransigence should not mean that Rachel should be on the hook for going into the rat’s lair and that she find a third party to suffer.

A relative of Rachel interjected: “What’s wrong with Chuck E. Cheese’s? They have all kinds of games and stuff is supposed to have things for adults to do now.”

I didn’t realize what passion I had for the topic: “It’s loud and mind-numbing, and makes children crazy and greedy for the crap they don’t need. And their pizza is mediocre at best.”

One of Thor’s relatives complained, “It’s her birthday…” but he was unapologetic: “I stand by my comment. Chuckie’s is a not place this man will enter again. Life is too short to spend 1 minute in that insane asylum.” At that moment 1) I so regretted the 700 or more minutes that have been sucked out of MY life at that place and 2) I wondered if the misspelling of the store was a deliberate attempt to evoke that sadistic doll Chucky.

Thor’s stand won him several other admirers. One response encapsulated it: “Thor is a principled man. My hero.”

And people started piling on CEC: “It is a madhouse of undisciplined children and an incubator for who knows how many nasty germs.” And “My niece used to manage a CEC… A couple of my favorite status updates of hers were, ‘Someone s@#$ in the sky tube,’ and ‘A parent just handed me a paper cup full of vomit.’ I’m sharing this just so you know it’s tons of fun for everyone involved.”

Fortunately, I’m at the point where I won’t be asked to go to any more birthday parties at Charles’ place. But, just in case, I’m practicing my Nancy Reagan routine of just saying no.