ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 33 of 91

T is for Traveling Wilburys

The two Traveling Wilburys albums were out of print for about a decade.

Everything about the creation of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, I love. From the website comes a story I already knew.

George Harrison was asked by the folks at Warner Brothers Records to put together a non-album B-side for a single from the ex-Beatles’ album Cloud Nine.

Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison had shared dinner, then went to Bob Dylan’s home studio in Malibu, California. George had left a guitar at Tom Petty’s house, and when he went to retrieve it, he invited Petty to join in the fun.

Harrison played the resulting track, Handle with Care, to the WB brass, who thought the song was too good to bury on the flip side of George’s single. Maybe it could become part of an album?

The five frontmen took on the persona of the Traveling Wilburys from this: “Referring to recording errors created by some faulty equipment, Harrison jokingly remarked to Lynne, ‘We’ll bury ’em in the mix’ Thereafter, they used the term for any small error in performance… Harrison suggested ‘The Trembling Wilburys’ as the group’s name; instead, Lynne suggested ‘Traveling’, with which the group agreed.”

The album was very well received and won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group in 1989. Unfortunately, “Roy Orbison died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988… Despite Orbison’s death, the remaining group members recorded a second and final studio album, which they intentionally misnumbered Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. It was released on October 30, 1990, and met with less success than the previous one.”

I had thought Volume 3 was a function of all the collaborations among them, but it was an acknowledgment of bootlegs of the original sessions featuring songs not on that first album.

The group talked about touring, but it never happened. I had heard rumors of Del Shannon replacing Orbison, but he died on February 8, 1990.

The two albums were out of print for about a decade, until they were re-released, with added tracks, in 2007, including Nobody’s Child, the title track for a benefit album. “The project was organized by Olivia Harrison, who created the Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation with the other wives of The Beatles (Barbara Bach, Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney) in April 1990.”

The singles

1988 “Handle with Care” (US 45, AUS 3, NZ 4, UK 21)
1989 “End of the Line” (US 63, AUS 12, NZ 11, UK 52)
1990 “Nobody’s Child” (NZ 9, UK 44)
1990 “She’s My Baby” (AUS 45, CAN 30, UK 79)
1991 “Wilbury Twist” (CAN 86)

You can find Nobody’s Child HERE. The remaining songs above, plus Inside Out, you can listen to HERE, and Margarita HERE.

For good measure, I Call Your Name – Ringo Starr, backed by Harrison, Lynne, Petty, and Traveling Wilburys drummer Jim Keltner on cowbell.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

S is for Pete Seeger

Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger talk about the origins of the Cherokee written language.

I was, and am, a big fan of the late folk singer Pete Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014). I wrote about him on his 90th birthday in 2009 HERE, though I am surprised that I didn’t mention the fact that I had the opportunity to actually talk with Pete at the Springboks demonstration.

My affection for the We Shall Overcome album I have documented.

I remember watching him singing Waist Deep in the Big Muddy on The Smothers Brothers Show after it had previously been yanked by CBS.

The documentary Wasn’t That A Time, about the reunion of the Weavers- Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and Lee Hays – came out in 1982. I saw it at least a decade later. You should watch it.

Still, I keep learning things about the singer. Earlier this year, I wrote about the song Black and White, popularized by Three Dog Night but performed a decade and a half earlier by Seeger.

Then there was this: Rainbow Quest (1965–66) was a U.S. television series devoted to folk music. It was on public television, but not in any market I was in. There were 39 episodes. Here’s a description of the last one:

“Way back in the halcyon days of black and white TV, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger talk about the origins of the Cherokee written language, and sing a Peter La Farge song of the Seneca trust broken in treaties with the U.S. government.” June Carter also appeared on that episode.

You can watch a sample of it HERE.

“Starting in the early 1980s 38 of the shows were made available on VHS, Betamax, and 3/4″ (U-Matic) tapes… The 39th show, featuring Johnny Cash and June Carter, was withheld at the request of Pete Seeger because Johnny Cash was heavily on drugs during his appearance. However, in the late ’90s, this show was released to the public.”

Here are some other episodes, along with the last episode in full.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

R is for Red

Modern surveys show red is the color most commonly associated with heat, activity, passion, sexuality, anger, love and joy.

Red, as Wikipedia notes, is “the color at the end of the spectrum of visible light next to orange and opposite violet.”

It’s also both one of the “additive primary colors of visible light, along with green and blue”… AND “one of the subtractive primary colors, along with yellow and blue, of the.. traditional color wheel used by painters and artists.

“Since red is the color of blood, it has historically been associated with sacrifice, danger, and courage.

“Modern surveys in the United States and Europe show red is also the color most commonly associated with heat, activity, passion, sexuality, anger, love, and joy.

“In China and many other Asian countries, it is the color of happiness.”

Of course, most STOP lights and stop signs are red. This means that RED is a contradiction. Action and stopping. Anger and joy.

I thought I’d list some RED songs. The links to the titles are descriptions of the songs; the links to the artists are the recordings. The chart action refers to the Billboard (US) pop charts.

Red and Blue
Dave Clark Five (#89 in 1967)

Red Red Wine
Neil Diamond (#62 in 1968)
UB40 (#34 in 1984, #1 in 1988)

Red Roses for a Blue Lady
Vic Dana (#10 in 1965)
Dean Martin

Red Rubber Ball
Cyrkle (#2 in 1966)
Seekers

Red Sails in the Sunset
Bing Crosby (1935)
Nat King Cole (#24 in 1951)
Tab Hunter (#57 in 1957)
Platters (#36 in 1960)
Fats Domino (#35 – and #24 soul – in 1963)

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

Q is for queue

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city.

The word queue has several meanings. The first I learned is “a braid of hair worn hanging down behind,” which I swear I learned in an episode of the TV western Bonanza, when someone cut off the queue of a Chinese man, bringing the victim dishonor. When I was growing up, my great aunt Deana and I used the word frequently when we played the board game SCRABBLE.

But the meaning I think of usually is “a file or line, especially of people waiting their turn.” Specifically, I think that line that feeds to several cashiers at the drug store, or clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or tellers at a banker. Though it doesn’t seem to be in the definition, I’ve always distinguished it from “line”, such as what one finds at the grocery store, where I’m always in the longest one.

Generally, I prefer the queue to the line. But when the queue breaks down, I remember.

One time was in 1999 when my new bride and I were flying back from our honeymoon in Barbados (thanks, JEOPARDY!), we stopped at New York City’s JFK airport to go through customs. The queue somehow got turned into a figure eight, and we spent an inordinately long time stuck on the bottom part of the number, even as others passed us.

Another time was in 2011, at Niagara Falls when the elevators broke down while we were at the base of a boating area. Some staff tried to create a queue, but it failed miserably.

Since I’m kvetching, the worst voting line I ever experienced was on February 9 of this year. It was a revote of a proposition to renovate Albany High School, which was rejected by a few hundred votes in November. The $179.9 million request in February trimmed over $10 million from the original budget.

I got to the school, where there were three lines, one, I was told by someone in line, to check in, and two to get the ballots. This didn’t make any sense and was incorrect.

In fact, as one of the guys involved with the school district eventually explained, one line was A-G, another H-R, and a third, S-Z. Or something like that, since he said two different lines contained H. In any case, I was in the WRONG line, and had to switch to the end of another.

Halfway through this second line, they run out of ballots. So one of the workers, who worked in the school as a secretary in that school, made copies of a blank ballot. Unfortunately, the copied ballots wouldn’t run through the scanning machine, so the workers had to reconfigure the machine to take the paper ballots to be counted later.

As I was leaving, people became even testier in the queue. The guy who had made an announcement 20 minutes early got all indignant, yelling at the crowd, “I TOLD you what line to be in!” Except that about half of them would not have HEARD the announcement, since they arrived afterward. He managed to take a bad situation and make it worse.

I spent 40 minutes in the process, which should have taken less than a quarter of that. The problem of the lines would have been EASILY remedied if someone had made SIGNS indicating which queue to be in.

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city, leading to petitions to State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to throw out the results, when the referendum passed by 189 votes. However, she upheld the February vote to rebuild and renovate Albany High School, denying claims that the vote should be invalidated.

“I cannot conclude that petitioners have established that the fundamental fairness of the … bond vote was compromised and I find no basis upon which to overturn the results of the vote,” the commissioner wrote.

Now, this wasn’t nearly as bad as the fiasco that was the 2016 Arizona primary election, which involved people standing in line FIVE HOURS to exercise their franchise.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

P is for photography of the Civil War

Civil War photography changed war from something remote to something with visceral impact.

Photography of the Civil War has fascinated me for many years. Wikipedia says: “The American Civil War was the fifth war in history to be photographed [without specifying the first four], and was the most widely covered conflict of the 19th century.” The most famous photographer of the conflict was Mathew Brady, but there were several other men behind the camera.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: President Abraham Lincoln “called up 75,000 militiamen to put down an insurrection of Southern states,” in what proved to be a painfully optimistic assessment of the length of the struggle. “

“Brady secured permission from Lincoln to follow the troops in what was expected to be a short and glorious war.” Ultimately, Brady instead financed a corps of field photographers who, together with those employed by the Union military command and by Alexander Gardner, made the first extended photographic coverage of a war.

“The terrible contest proceeded erratically; just as the soldiers learned to fight this war in the field, so the photographers improvised their reports. Because the battlefields were too chaotic and dangerous for the painstaking wet-plate procedures to be carried out, photographers could depict only strategic sites camp scenes, preparations for or retreat from action, and, on rare occasions, the grisly aftermath of battle.”

Yes, this picture is likely who you think it is. Check out how to replicate the wet-plate process today.

It is clear that photography of the Civil War changed war from something remote to something with visceral impact.

The Library of Congress has an online collection [which] “provides access to about 7,000 different views and portraits made during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and its immediate aftermath.” Some of them are much more gruesome than what you see here.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18