Ramblin' with Roger

The downside is that I simply cannot tell you the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids, or who Lindsey Lohan’s feuding with now. The good news is that I don’t know the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids… The other good thing is when I’m in the doctor’s or dentist’s office, I always go for the People magazine, just to find out how culturally out of touch I am.

The one I last caught was the People Extra, 30 Exclusive Celebrity Excerpts from December 2006, with Teri Hatcher, Anderson Cooper (yes, GP!), Vanessa Williams, and the ubiquitous Rachael Ray on the cover. Some of it was actually rather interesting: Cooper on his brother’s suicide, Bob Newhart on becoming a dad, Larry David on “My Seinfeld Life”.

Then I read “The Son We Lost” by Elizabeth Edwards. She’s the wife of 2008 Presidential candidate John Edwards, and was writing about Wade, their 16-year-old, who was killed when the Jeep he was driving flipped off a highway in North Carolina on April 4, 1996. I knew it would be painful, but then I read this:
The grocery store was hard. How many times could I pass his favorite food, his choice of soda? Once he came crashing in on me, and I was thrown to the floor. I sat in the soda aisle and cried. Although the store was crowded, no one walked down the aisle in which I sat, flattened by Cherry Coke.
It was that paragraph that really got to me.

The person I was rooting for was a guy named John O’Hara. He was convicted in 1997 of felony voter fraud for voting using his girlfriend’s address, which he claimed (unsuccessfully) was his primary address. He was running against the Democratic machine candidates, most recently against Assemblyman James Brennan in a 1996 primary.

Those of you from New York State are likely aware of the selective persecution, I mean prosecution, that was going on. O’Hara lost his law license, was fined $20,000, and served 1500 hours of community service.

Recently, I was reading an article about how fuzzy the concept of “primary residence” is, with what was the “summer home” or “winter home” now as equipped as the traditional primary residence.

I relate to this situation because I’ve been there. I went to college in New Paltz, NY in 1971, but continued to vote from my hometown of Binghamton, NY. However, when my family moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974, I decided that I’d register in New Paltz. There were two county registrars, a Democrat and a Republican. The latter, fearing a horde of students taking over the town, wanted me to register where my parents lived. (The state law at that time had a clause that one could “neither gain nor lose residency by being a student”, but I didn’t HAVE another residence. I argued that I hadn’t, at that point, even BEEN to Charlotte, and that I would be ill-equipped to be conversant with the issues. The Rep ultimately relented.

So, did John O’Hara move his residence 14 blocks fraudulently? I don’t know, but the arcane registration laws in this state, which technically require one to re-register if one moves from one apartment to another in the same building, makes me sympathetic to his cause. I know folks who’ve moved and voted from their old address because they had not had a chance to re-register. (Note: I did not turn them in.)

In fact, let me admit my own culpability. I moved from Jackson Heights, Queens, NY to sleeping on my friend’s sofa in New Paltz, NY in September 1977. I remember this clearly because NYC was having a Democratic mayoral primary between Ed Koch (who won) and Mario Cuomo on the second Tuesday of that month. Where was my residence? Well, technically, I didn’t have one, but I was registered in Queens. My options were to be disenfranchised – I didn’t have anything that would show I lived in New Paltz – or vote in Queens; I voted in Queens. (Incidentally, Koch and Cuomo had a rematch in the 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Who won? Ever heard of Governor Koch? I didn’t think so.)

Recently, I received Still the Same…Great Rock Classics Of Our Time. Here’s the songlist.
1. Have You Ever Seen The Rain
2. Fooled Around And Fell In Love
3. I’ll Stand By You
4. Still The Same
5. It’s A Heartache
6. Day After Day
7. Missing You
8. Father & Son
9. The Best Of My Love
10. If Not For You
11. Love Hurts
12. Everything I Own
13. Crazy Love

These songs are 20, 30, 40 years newer than the tunes of his popular The Great American Songbook series, none of which I own, of course. The tunes came out primarily in the 1970s at a point when Rod Stewart’s greatest music was produced.

For the most part, I like the SONGS on the album, and on most of them, he did (just) OK, but it would have been just as well – or better – if someone put together a compilation album of those songs by the original artists – I’m sure someone has, somewhere.

As a friend put it: “It was almost like he was doing karaoke – all fine and good, but adding little to the originals. And this was the guy who, early on, did dynamite versions, reworking Street Fighting Man, Country Comforts, Reason To Believe, I’m Losing You, Twisting the Night Away, and Pinball Wizard, making them his own. This just sounded like he came in, they gave him some lyric sheets, and he sang what was there–no real passion to put his stamp on it.”

From Chris Black, who, astonishingly, is even more lazy than I.

1) Panic in Detroit (from Aladdin Sane)-“looks a lot like Che Guevera”. Great background singing.
2) Under Pressure (with Queen)-with a bass line so good, even Vanilla Ice sounded (relatively) good.
3) Star (from Ziggy Stardust)-I did so much hard dancing to this song in my dorm room, I was grateful to the slowdown at the end.
4) Golden Years (from Station to Station)-I saw Bowie do this on Soul Train. The kids didn’t know what to make of the Thin White Duke, but they liked the song.
5) Fame (from Young Americans)-the original, not the inferior Fame ’90 remix that I have on the Pretty Woman soundtrack. Co-written by John Lennon. LOVE the scales of “fame, fame, fame, fame…”
6) Young Americans (from YA)- also on Soul Train. “Do you remember your President Nixon“, whose birthday, BTW, is tomorrow.
7) TVC15 (from STS)-because I like the beat.
8) Changes (from Hunky Dory)- from the first Bowie album I owned.
9) Fashion (from Scary Monsters)-I was at Fred Hembeck’s house this summer, and Fred, his daughter Julie and I were watching Bowie videos. Boy, is the video of this one of its time.
10) DJ (from Lodger)-Reminds of the day when “I am the DJ, I am what I play” applied to many disc jockeys, not just a relatively few.

I must make special mention of David Bowie’s duet with Bing Crosby, “Peace on Earth”/”Little Drummer Boy”, and the strange story behind it: Bowie’s hatred of “Drummer Boy”, the quick rewrite, Crosby’s death before the special aired in 1977. I watched it (and you can, here or here) when it was originally broadcast and saw the bizarre banter about John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, then this duet, which, improbably, really worked. I STILL want to know: did Bing really know who Bowie was?