Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

Favorite sports (and version) QUESTION

It seems that half of the NBA gets into the playoffs anyway, making the regular season almost meaningless.

Simple query this time: what are your favorite sports? Are there versions or levels of the sport you enjoy more (or less)?

For instance, I like baseball. I like Major League Baseball, like watching it on TV, though I hate the fact that the National League has 16 teams and the American League has 14, for reasons Scott discussed here. But I really enjoy attending Minor League Baseball. College baseball’s interesting, but they still use those aluminum bats, which I find to be sacrilege at that age level. If the Little League World Series happens to be on, I’ll watch it.

I like football. I like the NFL, and particularly how the divisions are even. The league has found a way to distribute money more equitably so that there is more parity than in the college game. While I like the college game, I hate how it’s become a quasi-professional league, which in turn has caused several teams’ victories to be voided. Alabama and Ohio State (disgraced coach Jim Tressel, pictured), and several other teams have had their wins vacated in the past couple of seasons, with the expectations of it continuing in the future.

College basketball can also be subject to fraud. But the March Madness scheme, allowing teams from “weak” conferences to compete with the “major” conferences, unlike in football, makes the season more exciting. Meanwhile, it seems that half of the NBA gets into the playoffs anyway, making the regular season almost meaningless.

What are your sports favorites and dislikes?

Put Billy Preston in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!

on what would have been Billy Preston’s 65th birthday, I’m making a pitch for him to make it into the rock hall as a session musician.

Billy Preston, George Harrison, President Gerald Ford, all deceased.

While I’m less and less caring about who gets selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Performer category, I’ve become more and more interested in categories such as early influences and non-performers. I’m especially intrigued by the sideman category since Leon Russell was inducted in 2011. After all, he was a performer of some commercial success, but not enough to make it as a performer. But he played on a lot of albums for other artists and was inducted based on that.

The late Billy Preston is similarly situated. He had greater singles success than Russell, with songs such as Outa-Space, Will It Go Round in Circles, Space Race, and Nothing from Nothing, though less so with his albums. But he was well known as a session musician. “Preston collaborated with some of the greatest names in the music industry, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Band, Nat King Cole, Little Richard, Eric Burdon, Ray Charles, Joe Cocker, George Harrison, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, King Curtis, Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, Quincy Jones, Mick Jagger, Peter Frampton, Phyllis Hyman, Richie Sambora, Sly Stone, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Norah Jones, and Ringo Starr.” Not to mention gospel great Mahalia Jackson. Both Russell and Preston played on the legendary Concert for Bangladesh.

The label on the “Get Back” single credits “The Beatles with Billy Preston”. Here’s the famed Beatles doing Get Back, live on the rooftop.

More Preston appearances:

Ray Charles & Norah Jones-Here We Go Again. Billy on organ.

John Lennon-God. Billy on piano.

Johnny Cash-Personal Jesus. Billy on piano.

Ringo Starr-I’m the Greatest. Billy on organ.

But probably my favorite piece is Billy at the organ on The Rolling Stones-I Got The Blues from the album Sticky Fingers.

So, on what would have been Billy Preston’s 65th birthday, I’m making a pitch for him to make it into the rock hall as a session musician.

Oh, and here’s the first song from Billy’s first Apple album, That’s The Way God Planned It, a song called Do What You Want To.

 

V-A-C-A-TION in the summertime

The last two-week vacation, BTW, was in 1998.

Vacation is one of those vaguely foreign concepts to me. It doesn’t feel light, like that Connie Francis song [listen]. And the idea of taking two weeks off from work somehow became anathema to me, not because I don’t necessarily enjoy the time off, but because I generally end up spending close to a week before the event trying to get ahead at work, and at least a week afterward catching up anyway. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t had one in 13 years, until last month.

So the next couple weeks, or more, I’ll be writing about My Summer Vacation that took place the first couple weeks of August 2011. Frankly, much of it was SO busy that it was difficult to process until after the fact. The first week and a half were jam-packed, possibly more than what was ideal. I won’t be writing about it EVERY day, because that would be too grueling for ME (and probably you).

The last two-week vacation, BTW, was in 1998. I took a week to go to Detroit and Cleveland. In Detroit, I went to where they made the Motown music, a couple of Henry Ford museums, and a baseball game at the now-defunct Tiger Stadium. In Cleveland, I wanted to go to a baseball game, but one couldn’t get a ticket to Jacobs Field; one can now easily acquire tickets to what is now called Progressive Field, the name of which, like most naming-rights stadia, I can never remember. The highlight, though, was going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; I remember that there were tributes to two Carls who had died recently: Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys (d. February 6, pictured) and Carl Perkins (d. January 19), forever linked in my mind.

The second week was supposed to be a time that I’d catch up on my reading, maybe see a couple of movies. But because my trip to the Midwest conflicted with a trip I had earned to go to Boston to try out for the game show JEOPARDY!, I ended up going to Washington, DC on vacation week #2. In addition to the tryouts, I spent an inordinate amount of time wandering through the halls of Congress; I seriously doubt I could, in a post-9/11 America, have spent so much time in places, many of which far more restricted. Also hung out at the Botanical Gardens, the then-new FDR Memorial (pictured), and a brief time at Arlington National Cemetery.

The good news, of course, is that I got on JEOPARDY! The downside is that I really could have used the downtime just to veg out. I don’t veg out nearly often enough.

August Rambling

GayProf noted Perry when he wrote: “Numerous songs en vogue right now celebrate women consuming alcohol to the point of blacking out, hooking up, or hurling (not always in that order). ”

Because I was out of town, I managed to miss a couple of significant cultural anniversaries. One was the 50th anniversary of the first real Marvel superhero comic, the Fantastic Four, by Stan Lee and Jack “King” Kirby. Mark Evanier explains why it had a November cover date. Check out this hour-long Kirby documentary. And here’s a link to the intro to the FF TV show.

The other was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lucille Ball. I watched most, if not all, of the episodes of every single one of her ongoing series, from the seminal I Love Lucy (1951-1957; 8.9 out of 10 on the IMDB scale), which started before even TV Guide and I were born but lives through the clever concept known as the rerun; to the star-studded (and too long, in my recollection) episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-1960; 8.6); to The Lucy Show (1962–1968; 7.3), which was the one with Lucy as Lucy Carmichael, Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz in the earlier shows) as Viv, and Gale Gordon as Lucy’s testy boss, Mr. Mooney.

Then there was Here’s Lucy (1968–1974, 6.8), where “Lucy Carter, a widow with two teen children [played her real kids with Desi Arnaz, Lucie and Desi Jr.] takes a job as a secretary for her stuffy brother-in-law [Gale Gordon, again.] Finally, there was Life with Lucy (1986; 6.0) “Lucy Barker, now a grandmother living with her daughter’s family” Gale Gordon also appeared in this show.

They declined in quality somewhat – Life with Lucy was particularly bad, as I recall – but if I didn’t quite LOVE Lucy, I liked the woman from upstate New York (Jamestown) quite a bit.

I believe this was Lucy’s favorite scene from her first series.

As you may have noticed, Katy Perry becomes the second artist, following Michael Jackson, to send five songs from an album to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and during his birth month, no less. An accomplishment to be sure, though the charts don’t reflect the same level of sales they used to. (Similarly true of top-rated TV shows: the numbers are far less than they used to be.) Not incidentally, GayProf noted Perry when he wrote: “Numerous songs en vogue right now celebrate women consuming alcohol to the point of blacking out, hooking up, or hurling (not always in that order). “

In pictures of models, “there are women (and occasionally men) contorted into positions that, were you to see actual people in them, you’d find curious or peculiar or perhaps even alarming.”

Natalie Cole with the Allman Brothers. Check out the sidebar for David Crosby, Graham Nash, and others.

On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data could reproduce the voices of humans with perfect fidelity. Brent Spiner can do the same with the voice of Patrick Stewart.

My new Kickstarter fave: Stripped is a documentary love letter to cartoonists and comic writers who’ve delighted newspaper readers for decades. Since 2008, 166 newspapers have shut down, leaving the future uncertain for many syndicated cartoonists. Amidst this industry upheaval, Stripped follows 60 cartoonists, including luminaries like Jim Davis, Scott McCloud, and Jeff Keane, as they navigate the uncharted waters of a new digital world.

Having seen the trailer for the Spider-Man movie reboot, I have no reason to actually see the movie. The first two movies with Tobey Maguire were great; even own them on DVD.
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Two music legends died this month. Jerry Leiber of the songwriting duo Leiber & Stoller wrote more songs than just about any pop composer. Here’s a list of most of them. Listen to Big Mama Thornton singing “Hound Dog”, some four years before Elvis Presley. Also, hear Charlie Brown by the Coasters; coincidentally, Carl Gardner, leader of the Coasters, died a couple of months ago.

Nickolas Ashford, who died August 22, was the songwriting partner and husband of Valerie Simpson. Ashford & Simpson wrote songs for Motown artists, Aretha Franklin, and others, as well as performing themselves. Hear Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell do You’re All I Need To Get By. Also, here’s a song originally performed by Ray Charles, I Don’t Need No Doctor (live) by Humble Pie.

The Jerry Leiber Cover Story on Coverville.

The Salon story about Leiber and Ashford.

GOOGLE ALERTS

Roger with the hula hoop

Rollie Roger Green T-Shirt

Roger Green, the proprietor of Hair by Roger, said noise and vibrations from the work were spoiling the salon’s ‘peaceful environment’. A spokesperson from United Utilities said: “We are fully aware of the impact this scheme has had on the community…”

“The Black Boardwalk Cat is a distinctive animal that has acquired an unusual place in the hearts of many university employees and students,” said Roger Green, associate professor of political science and public administration.

Forgotten Book: THE THROTTLEPENNY MURDER, Roger J. Green. My contribution this week to Pattinase’s Friday’s Forgotten Books is a book I read in 1993.

“Former Wisbech Mayor and Wisbech Standard editor, Roger Green who died in a road traffic collision on the A47 Wisbech bypass…. This particular Roger Green got a LOT of coverage.

G is for Gabriel, Peter Gabriel

As it turns out, I have TWO copies of Peter Gabriel’s third album in German, on vinyl.

Somehow, I was largely unaware of the music of the “progressive rock” group Genesis, which was formed in the late 1960s, until its 1974 album. The title track to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway [listen] got a bit of airplay in this area. Shortly after this album, lead singer Peter Gabriel left the group over personal and artistic differences, with Phil Collins taking over the lead vocals of Genesis. Gabriel would eventually initiate a solo career.

His first album (1977) was called Peter Gabriel and featured the song Solsbury Hill [listen], which was about his departure from Genesis, as well as the first version of Here Comes the Flood, which Gabriel claimed was overproduced; from the version on his greatest hits album, he may have been correct.

His second, less successful album from 1978, was also called Peter Gabriel, and featured D.I.Y. Fans dubbed the first collection Car and the second, Scratch, based on the album cover features.

But it was his 1980 third album, called Peter Gabriel, referred to as Melt, that really captivated my attention. The first song, “Intruder”, “featured the reverse-gated, cymbal-less drum kit sound which [Phil] Collins would also use on his single “In the Air Tonight”…. Gabriel had requested that his drummers use no cymbals in the album’s sessions, and when he heard the result he asked Collins to play a simple pattern for several minutes, then built ‘Intruder’ around it.” Another great song is “I Don’t Remember” – “I have no memory of anything at all.

The hit was Games Without Frontiers [listen]; this version is pitched higher with the treble is adjusted. I must admit that I heard the lyrics “Jeux sans frontieres” as “She’s so funky, yeah.” Oy.

This album was also realized in German; “alternate takes of some of the instruments seem to have been used occasionally, and the mix is somewhat different.”

As it turns out, I have TWO copies of this German-language album on vinyl. When I worked at FantaCo in the early 1980s, the boss gave each of us a copy of the album, but, for reasons now lost to me, one of my colleagues was angry about the gift, didn’t want it, and gave it to me. So, one of my LPs is still factory-sealed.

Here are Spiel ohne grenzen [listen] (“Games without frontiers” in German) and Biko [listen]. The latter song is about Stephen Biko, “a noted anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s,” who died in police custody in 1977. Gabriel’s song was one of several about Biko but among the most significant.

Peter Gabriel’s fourth album, from 1982, was called, you guessed it, Peter Gabriel. However, his US distributor slapped the title Security on it. The big hit was Shock the Monkey [listen]. This album was also released in German.

The next year, Peter Gabriel Plays Live came out, filled with previously released songs plus the minor hit I Go Swimming.

Peter Gabriel would go on to even greater commercial success, but that’s another tale.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

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