ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 31 of 91

D is for Donovan

“When I was a young man I was led to believe there were organizations to kill my snakes for me.”

The Scottish singer, songwriter, and guitarist Donovan Leitch turned 70 on May 10, 2016. Somehow I missed it, alas. He was one of those musicians that borrowed from folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and calypso to create a notable and rather recognizable sound that helped define the 1960s.

Like many artists of the period, such as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, his UK and US releases were quite different.

I associate Donovan with the Beatles. He contributed the line “sky of blue and sea of green” to “Yellow Submarine.” Donovan was among the guests invited to Abbey Road Studios for the orchestral overdub for “A Day in the Life”. He taught John Lennon a finger-picking guitar style in 1968.

Most notably, Donovan traveled to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, where all four Beatles, two Beach Boys, and actress Mia Farrow also showed up.

I have one much later album, Sutras, from 1996, described as deeply meditative, produced by Rick Rubin in the same period he was producing Johnny Cash. Though neither critically nor commercially as successful as the Cash albums, I enjoyed it.

Here is a list of 10 essential Donovan songs. And my favorite 16, with links, though only the first two songs are assured of their slots.

16. Eldorado (1996)- the words are by Edgar Allan Poe.
15. Epistle To Dippy (#19 in 1967) – this is, midst the nearly indecipherable psychedelia, a pacifist song.
14. I Love My Shirt, a sweet, simple song I remember watching on the Smothers Brothers TV show. It was the B-side of the single Atlantis in 1968 in the UK, but not in the US.
13. Universal Soldier (#53 in 1965) – it was written and recorded by Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, then covered by him.

12. Catch the Wind (#23 in 1965) – Donovan’s debut single brought the comparisons to Bob Dylan. It’s a “lovelorn ballad about Linda Lawrence (then the significant other of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones) who later became Donovan’s wife.”
11. Jennifer Juniper (#26 in 1968) – the song was inspired by Jenny Boyd, sister of George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd.
10. Wear Your Love Like Heaven (#23 in 1967). This shows up in some commercial for perfume, I think.
9. Rikki-Tiki-Tavi (#55 in 1970). It uses the mongoose from Rudyard Kipling’s story in The Jungle Book as a metaphor. “When I was a young man I was led to believe there were organizations to kill my snakes for me. i.e.: the church, i.e.: the government, i.e.: school. But when I got a little older I learned I had to kill them myself.”

8. Colours (#61 in 1965). Lovely in its simplicity.
7. Season of the Witch (1967) – Jimmy Page on guitar. Not a single in the US, but played regularly in his live shows, and covered often.
6. Sunshine Superman (#1 in 1966) – Jimmy Page on guitar. The former comic book fan in me loves “Superman and Green Lantern ain’t got nothin’ in me.”
5. There Is A Mountain (#11 in 1967). Very Buddhist. “First there is a mountain, there is no mountain, then there is.” Copped by the Allman Brothers as the foundation of their Mountain Jam. I copped “Oh, Juanita” for a song I wrote that has fortunately never seen the light of day.

4. Mellow Yellow (#2 for three weeks in 1966) – this song with some suggestive lyrics, was kept out of the #1 slot by Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, then by Winchester Cathedral by the New Vaudeville Band. It reportedly featured Paul McCartney on backing vocals.
3. Hurdy Gurdy Man (#5 in 1968) – Jimmy Page was one of the electric guitar players and John Paul Jones played bass, arranged the track, and booked the session musicians. John Bonham may, or may not, have played drums, depending on who’s telling the story, and when, memory being tricky. The tambura which Donovan himself plays had been given to him in India by George Harrison.
2. Celtic Rock (1970) – Donovan said that he used the drone of that tambura to create this song. “Hey kala ho kala ho la jai.” It practically defines the genre it namechecks.
1. Goo Goo Barabajagal (#36 in 1969) – billed “with the Jeff Beck Group. “Love Is Hot,” indeed.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

C is for cats

There is NO taking Midnight to the vet.

I’m having a conversation with a woman in my church choir. Somehow, the nature of pets came up. At one point, she said, “But you don’t HAVE cats.”

Oh yes, I do. Two of them, in fact, both for over two years. The Daughter knows their birthdays – one’s in January, the other in June – but I’m a BAD cat papa.

Midnight is the elder cat. He’s the one most likely to sleep in our bed, or fall asleep in the chair behind me in the office. Sometimes, I think he has nightmares. We got him from the animal shelter, which treated him well, but I wonder about his time before that.

Most people can’t pick him up, as won’t allow it. But usually, I can. I’ll scratch him under his chin.

He’s a little less hostile to (some) strangers than he had been. We still stick him in the basement when my mother-in-law comes over, or there’s a large crowd of people, for they make him nervous.

Stormy does tend to hang out with the females of the household. She’ll come to sit on one of their laps while we’re watching TV.

She NEVER sits on my lap. But she DOES like to rub my feet with her body, which is rather pleasant, actually.

She doesn’t like strangers either, but instead of “protecting” the household, she’ll generally just run away.

She tolerates me because I had been feeding them. Recently, though, my spousal person, having taken her to the vet – there is NO taking HIM to the vet – decided they needed to put them on a diet. So instead of splitting a can in the morning and another in the evening, she feeds them a third and a third, putting the remainder in the refrigerator.

The cats HATE this. they don’t like leftovers. They still do the ritual: He gets fed in one part of the kitchen, she in another. They both nibble a bit. Then, just to be annoying, he’ll come over and eat HER food, and she’ll run off. Later, she’ll sneak over and eat his.

They also HATE the vacuum cleaner. If I want them to stop doing something, such as him scratching the furniture, I will wheel over the vacuum. I don’t even need to turn it on. Usually, they’ll run away.

He usually sleeps in our bed, though occasionally both of them will sleep at our feet. And by “at our feet,: I mean I have to move them from my sleeping position.

The Daughter, who has contributed a few hundred dollars to the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society in the past three years, is the photographer. She has all these fancy filters on the camera function of her device, which she uses a LOT.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

B is for Betamax

There was a story late in 2015 that Betamax cassette tapes would be discontinued in March 2016. This surprised me. Sony had discontinued making the RECORDERS more than a dozen years earlier.

Betamax was “a videotape format in competition with VHS (introduced in Japan by JVC in October 1976 and in the United States by RCA in August 1977)…”

According to Sony’s own history webpages, the name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport, it looked like the Greek letter beta (β). The suffix -max, from the word “maximum”, was added to suggest greatness…

Betamax and VHS competed in a fierce format war, which saw VHS come out on top in most markets. The VHS format’s defeat of the Betamax format became a classic marketing case study. Sony’s attempt to dictate an industry standard backfired when JVC made the tactical decision to forgo Sony’s offer of Betamax in favor of developing its own technology…

It is odd, too, because all the experts, and most of the users, considered Betamax a superior product in terms of recording quality.

By 1980, JVC’s VHS format controlled 60% of the North American market. The large economy of scale allowed VHS units to be introduced to the European market at a far lower cost than the rarer Betamax units. In the United Kingdom, Betamax held a 25% market share in 1981, but by 1986, it was down to 7.5% and continued to decline further. By 1984, 40 companies made VHS format equipment in comparison with Beta’s 12. Sony finally conceded defeat in 1988 when it, too, began producing VHS recorders though it still continued to produce Betamax recorders until 2002.

In Japan, Betamax had more success…, but eventually both Betamax and VHS were supplanted by laser-based technology…

One other major consequence of the Betamax technology’s introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the “Betamax case”), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses.

I never owned a Betamax machine. Seeing two incompatible technologies vying in the marketplace, I bought NEITHER machine until it was clear that VHS was going to win out. My first VHS player I didn’t purchase until c. 1985, one of the late adapters.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

A is for Almanac

I’d test myself to see if I could remember which Presidents of the United States had been Secretary of State.

From the time I was about ten years old, I would get for Christmas a World Almanac almost every year. And I was happy.

When I was growing up, it was my parents making the purchase. As an adult, it would be a significant other, or else I would gift it to myself.

The almanac contained tons of statistics. Some of them were rather static: the highest mountains, the longest rivers. But other info was ever-changing, such as the largest cities, and the list of countries of the world – with a section of color maps!

There was a section on sports, with the most recent seasons in college basketball and football, the Olympics, and several professional sports.

I’d test myself to see if I could remember which Presidents of the United States had been Secretary of State, or what languages were most popular in the world. I’d check on the birthdays of celebrities or calculate the day of the week of some historic event.

In 1998, I started reading the World Almanac voraciously in anticipation of testing to get on the quiz show JEOPARDY! In truth, I don’t know that it helped glean new information, but it was nice to confirm things I already know.

My favorite editions are in the years following a Presidential election when it breaks down the voting in great detail.

The best feature in the almanac is that it cites the sources of the data it provides, so if I needed more information, I know where to look.

Odd thing, though: I realized in 2014 and 2015, I wasn’t using the almanac as much as I did in the past. And in 2016, I never got a copy at all, for only the third time in over a half-century.

But I will get the 2017 World Almanac, even if I have to buy it myself. After all, 2016 IS a Presidential election year.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

Z is for The Zombies

The Zombies reformed with the same lineup in 1997

The Zombies was a British Invasion group. From 1962 to 1967, the group consisted of:
Colin Blunstone – lead vocals
Rod Argent – organ, vocals
Paul Atkinson – guitar, vocals
Chris White – bass, vocals
Hugh Grundy – drums

The group won a music competition sponsored by a London newspaper and were signed a recording contract with Decca in 1964.

“Rod Argent built the lyrics of ‘She’s Not There’ from a John Lee Hooker song, whose title ‘No One Told Me’ became the opening phrase of the Zombies song. The jazzy rock tune, which phased in and out of minor key, was a huge hit. It sold over one million copies.

The next US single was “Tell Her No”, the Beatlesque tune which repeats the word “no” 63 times. But the band only had mixed success in the next couple of years and broke up in December 1967.

Yet one track from the well-regarded, but marginally selling, album Odessey and Oracle, “Time of the Season”, “written by Argent, was released as a single and eventually became a nationwide hit.”

“After the Zombies disbanded, Rod Argent formed the band called Argent in 1969, with White as a non-performing songwriter.” Russ Ballard was the lead vocalist. Has anyone moved further alphabetically in a band than Rod Argent?

In the absence of the actual Zombies, one promoter hired four kids from Texas to tour America “pretending to be a defunct British psych-rock band.” Two of the band members would go on to form the group ZZ Top.

The real Zombies reformed with the same lineup in 1997 but broke up quickly. Argent & Blunstone fronted a band starting in 2000, which morphed into The Zombies by 2004. Rod Argent’s cousin Jim Rodford played in these lineups as well as with Argent.

LINKS

She’s Not There – The Zombies (1964 – #12 UK, #2 US Billboard, #2 in Canada) HERE or HERE or HERE.

Tell Her No – The Zombies (1965 – #6 US) HERE or HERE or HERE

Time of the Season – The Zombies (1969- #1 Canada, #3 for two weeks US Billboard) HERE or HERE or HERE

Hold Your Head Up – Argent (1972 – #5 UK, #5 US Billboard) HERE (single) or HERE (long version) or HERE (long version)

ABC Wednesday – Round 18