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.

Beatles Island Songs, 173-164

Just watched on PBS How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, about how Beatles music was smuggled into the Soviet Union and represented freedom.

JEOPARDY Answer of the day: ROCK & ROLL HISTORY: The name “Beatles” was inspired by the backup group of this singer. (The question below.)

The rules of engagement

173 It’s All Too Much from Yellow Submarine. The niftiest part of the Harrison tune is the guitar intro.
172 Yesterday from Help! (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). When my father, sister, and I used to perform together when I was a teenager, it was in my sister’s repertoire. It’s a perfectly nice song, but for the life of me, I don’t know why it’s been covered 2500 or 3500 or however many times it has, especially since most of them sound not dissimilar to the original. I also realize the song made me, and my office mate at the time, peevish when two versions of it showed up on Anthology 2, not that far apart on the album, and I would tend to skip past it. “Scrambled Eggs,” indeed.
171 Baby’s in Black from Beatles for Sale (UK), Beatles ’65 (US). One writer suggested that the songs of this period were rather melancholy because of the stress of Beatlemania – touring, movies, plus recording. Maybe. I like the black/blue imagery, but much of the rest sounds like Lennon/McCartney circa 1962.
170 Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? from the white album. Rather funny, if insignificant song by McCartney.
169 I Me Mine from Let It Be. This is the title of a Harrison autobiography. A slight song, I do like the change of rhythms.
168 I Wanna Be Your Man from With the Beatles (UK), Meet the Beatles (US). A ditty McCartney and Lennon gave to the Rolling Stones but also had Ringo sing.
167 Girl from Rubber Soul. It’s OK, but the album is filled with much greater songs.
166 Old Brown Shoe. B-side of The Ballad of John and Yoko. It’s OK, in that laid-back Harrison style.
165 You Never Give Me Your Money from Abbey Road. This is actually HIGHER than I had planned. I thought the reprise of this song in Golden Slumbers would allow this track to be in the 200s, but the song argued otherwise.
164 P.S. I Love You from Please Please Me (UK), Introducing the Beatles/The Early Beatles. A pleasant enough story song.

Just watched on PBS How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, about how Beatles music was smuggled into the Soviet Union and represented freedom. It also talks about the myth of a secret Soviet performance by the Beatles, generated by the song Back in the USSR. see it HERE or the first part HERE, with subsequent parts on the sidebar.

JEOPARDY! Question of the day: Who was Buddy Holly? (His backup group was called The Crickets.)

If it was 30 years ago, why do I remember it so well?

“The Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization.”


Unfairly or not, I always associate John Lennon’s death with the breakup of my girlfriend the week before. It was Monday, December 1, 1980, and, unlike all of those “grownup” breakups in the movies of that time, this was painful and acrimonious. About the only cinematic aspect of it was the line from near the end of the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, delivered by Alvy Singer (Allen): “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

So when the FOLLOWING Monday night came around, it was incumbent upon me to do whatever I could that would be contrary to what I would likely be doing with her. The choice was clear: I needed to watch Monday Night Football. It’s not as though I never watched the game, but it was usually a bit here and there. This time I was going to watch the whole damn thing.

And, if I recall correctly, it was a pretty close game between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, when announcer Howard Cosell said at about 11:15 p.m., “One of the great figures of the entire world, one of the great artists, was shot to death horribly at the Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City. John Lennon is dead. He was the most important member of the Beatles, and the Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization. Not just people in Liverpool, where the group was born, but the people of the world.”

Here’s a snippet of the broadcast after that point.

So the first thing I do is call my good friend Karen, who had written, for our sixth-grade newsletter, a fantasy story about winning tickets to a Beatles concert, and who, that very fall, was working for his record company and promoting his and Yoko’s album, Double Fantasy. But her line was busy. I called my ex-girlfriend and told her; she was appreciative of the fact that I told her. I called Karen several times after that, but the line remained busy. I began to listen to my favorite radio station, WQBK-FM, Q104, and listen to the requests pouring in. It was either that night or the next morning that I asked for, oddly, The End by the Doors, and they played the whole 11-minute version.

Eventually reached Karen at about 1:40 a.m. When she heard my voice, she just cried for 10 minutes. We talked the next day, when I went out and bought, at lunchtime, Rock ‘n’ Roll; there wasn’t a copy of Double Fantasy to be had.

And thinking about time period STILL fills me with a surprising amount of sadness.

JEOPARDY! factoid: Calling him a Revolutionary, in 2000 Fidel Castro dedicated a statue of John on the 20th anniversary of his murder.

I was watching LENNONYC this past weekend – it’ll be repeated on my local PBS station tonight – and it was a good portrait of John’s life from 1971 until the end. Much of the info I knew, but a few bits I did not, such as Yoko going back to the studio after John died to listen to his outtakes.
***
Denise Nesbitt remembers.

U is for the United Nations

Would an American presence have help the world avoid WWII?


The United Nations turned 65 years old on 24 October 2010. Representatives of 92 nations met in San Francisco, CA USA just after the conclusion of the European theater portion of World War II, even before the end of the war in the Pacific theater to come up with a document.

I must admit to being a bit of a UN addict. I know all of the former Secretaries-General and their nations, as well as the current one; I’ve been to the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza more than once – usually at a protest of some sort – and the Swede’s death in 1961 was one of the first things I remember external to my life. When the UN is a topic on a game show, as it was recently on JEOPARDY!, I generally do well.

UNICEF

For as long as I can remember, there has been a coterie of Americans that have wanted the nation to get out of the United Nations. Ostensibly, it was because the UN is limited in what it can do in achieving peace. Even if that is partially true, it is hardly the totality of the organization’s mission, which includes addressing issues of health, climate change, human rights, the role of women, and much more.

Probably the UN organ best known in the US is UNICEF, which addresses, among many other things, AIDS, cholera in Haiti, and malnutrition in flooded sections of Pakistan.

When I was younger, I couldn’t help but recall that the US, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts, balked at joining the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations; would an American presence have help the world avoid WWII? Perhaps, I thought, perhaps naively, if the US were to have called for a less punitive attitude toward the failed German state.

I suspect that some of the UN naysayers are convinced that the United Nations is the vehicle by which the Apocalypse, presumably described in the Biblical book of Revelation, will take place. While the previous link provided doesn’t specifically mention the UN, this one does. Frankly, I find it unlikely, if only because the organization just doesn’t work in concert as well as the New Testament reading would require.

DC Comics PSA: Gifts to the United Nations! (December 1956).

In honor of the upcoming summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, three versions of a song that mentions the United Nations, Summertime Blues:
Eddie Cochran
Blue Cheer
The Who

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

All about Orange

Keep the pulp!

A bit of Monday Mayhem:

1. What is your favorite orange-colored thing on the planet?

John Boehner. No, I jest. Sunrise or sunset.

2. Ever see an orange person?

Albany mayor Jerry Jennings, who sometimes put Boehner to shame.

3. Name something that you hate that is orange.

Cantaloupe. Indeed, I’m just not a melon guy at all.

4. What is your favorite sports team that uses the color orange?

Easy – the Syracuse University Orangemen. If I were to pick a pro team, it’d be the blue-and-orange New York Mets.

5. Name an orange food.

A clementine, a type of orange fruit.

6. Tell us something funny that entails an orange (like a joke or image).

Eminem was on 60 Minutes in October, interviewed by Anderson Cooper.

He writes all of his own songs and delights in rhyming words others can’t.

We talked to him about how he does it in his private recording studio.

Eminem has said he bends the words.

“It’s just in the enunciation of it,” he explained. “Like, people say that the word ‘orange’ doesn’t rhyme with anything and that kind ‘a pisses me off because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange.”

“What rhymes with orange? I can’t think of anything,” Cooper remarked.

“If you’re taking the word at face value and you just say orange, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and you make it like more than one syllable? Orange, you could say like, ‘I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.’ So, you just have to figure out the science to breakin’ down words,” he replied.

7. When is the last time you ate an orange?

This summer.

8. What’s your opinion about pulp- does it belong in juice or should it be removed?

Keep the pulp!

9. Name an orange piece of your wardrobe.

T-shirt with my church’s logo on it.

10. Orange you glad we didn’t say banana?

And my daughter cannot yet tell that joke correctly. In time, I’m sure she will.

The horror movie mystery is solved

That movie absolutely terrified me for weeks! Thought someone was going to kill ME, and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet!

In one of those memes I do sometimes, there was a question about the movie that I found most scary. The problem was that I saw it when I was nine, give or take a year, couldn’t remember the title, and I didn’t even know how well I remembered the details.

Finally, I wised up and asked my friend, comic book artist, and more importantly in this context, horror film buff Steve Bissette:

What is the movie I’m trying to describe? I saw it c 1962, but it was likely the second run – it was paired with a 1956 Frances the Talking Mule film. The lead woman was very beautiful, very much so, and men wanted to kiss her, but if they did, she became very homely. In order to regain her beauty, she had to take this ring and stab them in the neck, killing them, then blow some powder afterward. Do you have ANY idea what I saw that freaked me out when I was nine?

The Leech Woman

Steve’s reply:

You saw THE LEECH WOMAN (1960), a black-and-white Universal-International film — and yep, they made the FRANCIS movies, too.

Here’s the Wiki synopsis, which is accurate:

A mysterious old woman approaches Dr. Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) and promises to reveal to him the secret of eternal youth. Following her to Africa, he and his wife June Talbot (Coleen Gray) witness the secret ceremony that utilizes orchid pollen and a victim’s pineal gland secretions. June returns to the United States alone and proceeds to keep herself young by killing people for their pineal secretions. She becomes enamored with a man half her actual age and kills his fiance to maintain her youthful appearance. Eventually, the cops come to investigate the murders and June kills herself by leaping from a window.

The preview trailer.

I wrote back:

THANKS, Steve! I’ve been puzzling about this for YEARS until it finally occurred to me to ask my favorite expert! That movie absolutely terrified me for weeks! Thought someone was going to kill ME, and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet!

***
Steve also went ape in tackling Prime-Apes!!! My Fave Planet of the Apes Knockoffs, such as Kamandi.

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