Ramblin' with Roger

1. What is the best advice you’ve ever taken? What is the worst?
For me going to library school – OK, being nagged to go to library school was clearly the best. The worst: taking a job I knew I shouldn’t have taken. I ended up in a car accident on the way to it, and I think karma was telling me something.

2. What was the best present you ever received? What was the worst?
Certainly, one of my favorites was when I was 16 and people put a bunch of very nice thoughts on pieces of colored paper and put those in this container. I was supposed to take out a piece every day, and I did.
My least favorites tend to be the ones with conditions tied to them. I won’t get any more specific.

3. What is your best month? Your worst?
My best is March. I suppose that may come off as egotistical, since my birthday is in March. But it is the hope of winter turning into spring, Lent to Easter. I happen to love listening to Requiems (Mozart, Rutter, Faure, Brahms, et al.) And now Lydia was also born in March, so there’s even MORE reason.
My worst is a bit of a cheat in that it’s bifurcated. It’s the couple weeks between Election Day, when I discover that candidates I wanted to win lose instead, and Thanksgiving. Lots of dead leaves and gray skies. That is to say, around now. Then it’s the couple weeks between shortly after New Year’s, when I realize how cold and dark it is, and the middle of January, when I see slow, but visible progress toward more daylight.

And heck, if you want to talk about good and bad movies, who am I to stop you?

Since her birthday is always during the week of the Great American Smokeout, I’ll tell you one story on the topic. My mother never smoked, though my father did when I was growing up. One day, my mother purloined a pack of my father’s Winstons and my sister Leslie and I talked with her about smoking. (Baby sister Marcia was probably in bed by then.) So, we sat around the kitchen table and attempted to smoke cigarettes, the three of us. Naturally, we all just coughed. But neither Leslie or I really ever became smokers.

Still, my physical tolerance is still very low, and getting worse each year. Smokers smell badly to me, I’ve noticed yet again on the elevators in the building I work in. Smokers taste terrible; yes, I HAVE kissed smokers, though fortunately not lately. Smokers don’t look cool; they look like adults with pacifiers in their mouths. Smokers often sound terrible, with the cough and the rasp. So, please keep your secondhand smoke away from me.

When the governments want to try to balance their budget and, at the same time, create a financial disincentive to smoke, you’ll get no complaint from me.

Somehow, in my youth, I owned one album by the Royal Guardsmen. Yeah, yeah, the group that did all of those Snoopy songs. I don’t remember buying it, so maybe someone bought me “The Return of the Red Baron”, which had the distinction of being the only one of the four albums they put out that the time that didn’t have the dog from Peanuts on the cover.

Actually, by that time, I had become slightly annoyed with the Snoopy-fication of the newspaper strip, so maybe that’s how that particular LP ended up in the collection. Or maybe it’s that the group had the same initials as I do, I don’t know.

It was an OK album. But it had one song “Wednesday”, a/k/a “Any Wednesday”, that I really liked. It had lovely harmonies. You can hear about 30 seconds of it here. Also, it fit my day of the week collection:
Friday on My Mind- the Easybeats
Another Saturday Night – Sam Cooke
Sunday Will Never Be The Same – Spanky and Our Gang
Monday, Monday – the Mamas and the Papas
Ruby Tuesday – the Rolling Stones
(I didn’t have a Thursday song. Actually, I wrote a Thursday song. It was terrible. And off topic.)

Like most of their non-Snoopy songs, “Wednesday” stiffed on the charts, getting up to #98. I like it so much that I went to iTunes to buy it. Alas, only some Snoopy song there.

So after the failure, and in spite of the Florida band’s resistance, their producers got them ANOTHER Snoopy song. I got this description in an e-mail dashed off by Grand Comics Database board member, and more specifically in this context, FoF (Friend of Fred), Mike Catron:

Laurie Records released “Snoopy for President”, which started out with a spoken word introduction of a German-accented newscaster (the Red Baron himself) announcing the candidates for President in the United States during that primary season, among them, of course, “Kennedy”.

As this site notes, the song was released mere days before RFK’s assassination. (It also describes the record label’s off-again, on-again relationship with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.) OK, here’s something weird. According to my Billboard bible, Snoopy for President first charted on 7/13/68, a full month AFTER RFK was killed. Of course, it was only on the charts for two weeks and only got to #85, w/ the B-Side, “Behind the Lines” on Laurie 3451. Then, this note: “a slightly different and shorter version issued on Laurie 3541 (A),” which failed to chart. But I wonder if some radio stations switched versions.

Mike Catron recalls: I have no idea whether it was still getting airplay at that point but I continued to listen to my little 45 from time to time and it always made me a little sad to be reminded of such a dark moment — and the melancholy of what might have been — on what would have otherwise been a silly little song with an especially uplifting moment at the end.

I was fascinated to find this on the Royal Guardsmen blog:
In 1966 the United States Government was in the mind to send troops to defend the idea of Democracy, in a country divided. The men and women of our armed forces needed understanding from the folks back home, but they didn’t get much. They seldom heard good news, the times were turbulent and home was far away. The Royal Guardsmen gave them a song to scramble to.

Seriously, I’d love to hear from any Vietnam-era vet and hear if you thought the antics of Snoopy and the Red Baron were songs to scramble to.

Independently, Mike and I both found a neat little tie-in that relates directly to Fred’s piece. Check out this excerpt from an interview with members of the Royal Guardsmen:
ET: I think “Mother, Where’s Your Daughter” is one of the best songs you ever recorded.
BILL: That was written for us by Dick Holler. He also wrote “Abraham, Martin, and John”, which was originally supposed to go to us. According to Barry, that song was written for us but they reneged and gave it to Dion so Dick Holler wrote “Mother, Where’s Your Daughter” for us. It was any attempt to get us away from the Snoopy thing.
BILLY: It was an attempt to pacify us.
BARRY: I liked that one and I think that was an interesting time, too. I’m not really sure about all the politics of it but Laurie Records was pretty fat cat at that time, we had really helped them get back on their feet. I did the original demo of “Abraham, Martin, and John” with Dick Holler and Phil said we could have the song. Two weeks later, I came back down and Dion was doing it. That really broke my heart. We had three years of making lots of money for Laurie and we were hoping we could get out of the bag but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The Abraham, Martin & John that Dion did, that Tom Clay and Moms Mabley(!) covered, was supposed to be a Royal Guardsmen song, maybe that non-Snoopy hit they so craved. Since it didn’t happen, soon thereafter, the group and the label parted ways, all of which is documented in the article.

Which brings us to Snoopy vs. Osama, “The new Royal Guardsmen 40th anniversary Snoopy recording.” List Price: $3.95. Somewhat ironically, given their disdain for being trapped in Snoopy-land in the 1960s, the song was written by members of the reunited band.

From the Royal Guardsmen blog:
Our guess is when the soldiers heard Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, it became a song to rally around. Today is no different, our fighting men and women have the same needs, even 40 years later. We want to give them what they need in a song. Compassion for the underdog, the feeling of usefulness, confidence and the motivation of success will go a long way in helping morale and lifting tspiritsprits. When you couple it with the American iconic humor of a heroic dog named Snoopy, you can’t go wrong. The formula was successful 40 years ago. With a fresh sound, why not today?

You can read the lyrics here. Maybe you can even hear an excerpt, though I cannot. Here’s the chorus:
Osama Bin Laden keeps runnin’ away
Snoopy’s gonna find him…..one of these days
And when he does… (and when he does)… ya know we’re all gonna sing
Good bye Bin Laden and the end of your terrorist ring.

And the final verse:

Then up ahead…. in a cloud of dust
Stood ol’ Bin Laden just lookin’ at us
Snoopy smiled and aimed….. then he fired his gun
TAKE THIS Bin Laden now you…. won’t have to run

This is NOT the dog to whom the Red Baron said, “Merry Christmas, my friend.”

Last word to Mr. Catron, because it pretty much mirrors my own sentiment:
Snoopy vs. Osama I don’t get. In the song trilogy (for you it’s a trilogy, for me it’s a quadra-something), the Red Baron turns out to be a decent guy, even a likeable character. I can’t see the same thing happening for Osama Bin Laden…
Bin Laden is just too grim and is current, instead of being a mythologized figure from a previous generation. (This was the era of Enemy Ace and Hogan’s Heroes, after all.) Pairing Snoopy with Bin Laden, to me, is just nasty. Very un-Peanuts. Very un-Schulz.