Tag: music

Most awarded songs #15

no relation

The finale of the most awarded songs #15. In honor of that, I’ll note some of the awards they got. RS is Rolling Stone 500, RIAA is Recording Industry of America, NPR is National Public Radio 100, BMI is Broadcast Music Inc, and RNN is the National Recording Registry.

10. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction– The Rolling Stones, #1 pop for four weeks pop, #19 RB only #3 in the UK in 1965. RS #2, RIAA #161, NRR. One of the most familiar hooks in all of pop music.

9.  Blue Suede Shoes – Carl Perkins, #2 pop for four weeks, but #1 in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago; #2 RB for four weeks, #3 country in 1956. RS #95, RIAA #78, NPR, NRR. A serious car accident prevented Carl from fully capitalizing on this hit.

8. Let’s Stay Together – Al Green, #1 pop, #1 RB for nine weeks in 1972. RS #60, RIAA #145, NPR, NRR. Despite what I might have joked in the past, Al’s NOT my cousin, to my knowledge.

Timeless

7.  What’s Love Got To Do With It – Tina Turner, #1 pop for three weeks, #2 for five weeks in 1984; Grammys for record and song of the year and pop female vocal; RS #316, RIAA #38, ASCAP #8. A return to form. Tina “was 44 when the song hit number one, at the time making her the oldest female solo artist to place a number-one single on the US Hot 100.”

6. Mack The Knife – Bobby Darin, #1 pop for nine weeks, #6 RB in 1959; Grammy record of the year, RS #255, RIAA #15, NPR, NRR. This is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their 1928 music drama The Threepenny Opera. It was translated into English in the 1930s. But the best-known translation was by Marc Blitzstein in 1954, which Darin adapted.

5. Oh, Pretty Woman – Roy Orbison, #1 for three weeks pop in 1964, #4 UK, RS #24, RIAA #43, BMI #26, NPR, NRR. The song was used in a 1990 film and a 2018 Broadway musical.

Posthumous

4. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay – Otis Redding (pictured),  #1 for four weeks pop, #1 for three weeks RB in 1968; Grammy RB song, RB male vocal; RS #26, RIAA #22, BMI #6, NPR. My wife and I were at Capital Rep seeing a musical about Janis Joplin some years ago, and I noted that Me and Bobby McGee was the second posthumous single to top the charts in the US. Dock was the first one.

3.  My Girl – The Temptations, #1 pop, #1 for six weeks RB in 1965; RS #88, RIAA #45, ASCAP #2, NRR, NPR. Smokey Robinson and Ronald White of the Miracles wrote this. Smokey was inspired by his wife, Claudette Rogers Robinson, who was also in the group. This was the first of four #1 pop hits by the Temptations.

2.  Rock Around The Clock – Bill Haley And His Comets, #1 pop for eight weeks, #1 for nine weeks UK, #3 for two weeks RB in 1955; RS #159, RIAA #12, ASCAP #86, NPR, NRR. Though it was released in 1954, it didn’t become an iconic hit until it was included in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle.

1.  Respect – Aretha Franklin, #1 for two weeks pop, #1 for eight weeks RB in 1967; Grammy RB record, RB female vocal; RS #5, RIAA #4, NRR, NPR. QoS and her sisters rearranged the song Otis Redding had written and recorded, and turned it into an empowerment anthem.

October rambling: Three Chaplains

“he pledged to donate almost all of his money to causes before he died”

I’ve seen and recommend that you watch the hour-long film Three Chaplains. “Muslim chaplains aim to make change in one of America’s most powerful institutions—the military.

“For them, the fight for equality and religious freedom begins on the inside.” Broadcasting on PBS, Independent Lens, November 6, 2023, and available elsewhere after that date. Here’s a review.

  “The Lie Detector Was Never Very Good at Telling the Truth” 

Per Giffords.org, there have been at least 565 mass shootings in the United States this year. Five hundred sixty-five mass shootings in the first 299 days.

Legal Eagle: When Police Raid A Newspaper for No Reason

 There Is No Such Thing as Cancer (Hank) and A Tale of Two Cancers (John)

The Census Bureau has posted a new Federal Register Notice inviting public comments on proposed changes to the 2025 American Community Survey (ACS) and Puerto Rico Community Survey (PRCS) questionnaires. Comments are due on or before December 19, 2023, and, once submitted, are part of the public record.

NYS geographic primer Food Safety and Prison Health Care and McKinsey consultants and chocolate: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

The GOP bets on extremist Mike Johnson (LA) as Speaker, risking 2024 prospects; also, his positions on health issues, his impossible agenda, and his belief that separation of church and state Is only a ‘shield for people of faith.’ A blistering rebuke from his hometown newspaper’s op ed. He is worse than you think.

Using Learning Styles to Your Advantage: the Complete Guide.

Early History of Bedloe’s Island, now known as Liberty Island.

 When Hybrid Works … But Doesn’t

Culcha

An early name for Albany and how it’s pronounced

How Lena Horne Won Over MGM — and Became a “Test Case” for Hollywood

 Hasan Minhaj Offers Detailed Response to New Yorker Story: “It Was So Needlessly Misleading”

Oscar Winner Buffy Sainte-Marie Responds to Questions About Her Native Heritage: “I Know Who I Am”

 The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time. The only two I’ve read were the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide (#17) – I’ve had at least a half dozen iterations over the years, and Life Itself by Roger Ebert (#45)

Interview with a SamuraiFrog by Splotchy

 Opening titles for 18 situation comedies of the seventies. I watched two of them, both on CBS, on Saturday nights at 8:30 p.m.

“The kick is up … and it’s … CLANG…”



Now I Know: The Halloween Costume You Can’t Buy and When Science Gets Unexpectedly Expensive and An Awkward Phone Call from Mom and The Giant Pink Bunny in the Middle of Nowhere and Everybody Was Kung Fu Panda Fighting and Paved With Good Intentions and Why Dorothy Couldn’t Surrender

Obits

Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92. “After piling up billions in business, he pledged to donate almost all of his money to causes before he died. He succeeded and then lived a more modest life.”

Kevin Phillips, who died at 82, published his first book at 29, a landmark work,  The Emerging Republican Majority, which “presciently predicted a rightward realignment in national politics driven by ethnic and racial divisions and white discontent.”

Richard Roundtree, Suave Star of ‘Shaft,’ Dies at 81. I never saw Shaft, but I did watch him as “the disgraced doctor Daniel Reubens on the NBC daytime soap opera Generations,” c. 1990.

Matthew Perry, Chandler on ‘Friends,’ Dies at 54. He “Masterfully Walked the Line Between Mirth and Melancholy.” All spiders are named Phil.

 Burt Young, Oscar-Nominated ‘Rocky’ Actor, Dies at 83. I saw the initial four Rocky pics, the first one with my mother

Richard Moll, Bull the Bailiff on ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 80

MUSIC 

Ghost Story soundtrack album

Celtic Rock – Donovan

Bless The Child OST suite

Songs from the Woods – Jethro Tull

The Great Pumpkin Waltz – Vince Guaraldi

Theme From Shaft – Isaac Hayes. My sister got this double album, but it contained two copies of the same record (Sides 1 and 4, I believe), and we had to get it replaced.

Somebody Like You – Giant Rooks

 Coverville 1461: Cover Stories for Ultravox and Thomas Dolby and 1462: The Natalie Merchant & 10,000 Maniacs Cover Story

Closer To Fine – Indigo Girls

Honky Tonk Heroes – Waylon Jennings

 Greg’s Drinking Song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 

The Beatles’ ‘Last Song,’ ‘Now and Then,’ Is Set for Release (Nov 2), Along With Expanded, Remix-Filled ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Hits Collections (Nov 9)

My top 5 rock albums

1966 to 1989

There was a question on Quora asking for people’s top 5 rock albums. What an inane question! How can anyone pick just five? So I decided to do it anyway.

First, some guidelines. I am not going to get into the definition of what is “rock.” I hear this every year when an ABBA, Nina Simone, or Joan Baez enters the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nor will I address the “best” albums because “best” has become an increasingly elusive term for me.

I could have picked Blue by either Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell, Who’s Next, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Abraxas by Santana, k.d. lang’s Ingenue, or approximately a zillion more, including at least three by Stevie Wonder.

I’m not selecting a greatest hits album; Sly and the Family Stone would otherwise be on the podium. There are no soundtracks, Broadway cast albums or compilations, so no The Harder They Come, Hamilton, or  West Side Story.  And if I do this in five years, three of these might be different.

The Eclectics

I decided on three of these because they are so eclectic.

Spike – Elvis Costello, which I mentioned back in 2009 in my 25 most influential albums. The All Music review calls it “maddeningly diffuse.” Its diffuseness may be why I like it because I don’t find it maddening at all. 

Veronica, Chewing Gum, Last Boat Leaving

That’s A Plenty – the Pointer Sisters. I first wrote about this album in 2006.  Then in 2014; unfortunately, only the links to Little Pony, Fairytale, and Black Coffee still work.

Salt Peanuts; Love In Them There Hills 

Revolver – The Beatles. I picked this one over other Beatles albums because I hate Run For Your Life (Rubber Soul). Abbey Road has Octopus’s Garden, which is too much in the Yellow Submarine vein. I may as well pick the album with Yellow Sub. It’s not my favorite song, but it fascinated me because the single, in the last verse, has “As we live a life of ease (a life of ease),” but the echo doesn’t happen on the album version I had.

The 2012 post has lots of bad links.

Taxman, For No One, Got To Get You Into My Life, Tomorrow Never Knows

Two more

Still Crazy After All These Years – Paul Simon. As I noted here in 2016. “Inextricably tied to the Okie in my mind.”

I Do It For Your Love, Have A Good Time, Title song.

Peter Gabriel (melt)- Peter Gabriel. I mentioned Gabriel in 2011 and 2020. In this post, also from 2020, I listed my favorite Gabriel songs, and the links still work! The ones from Melt have a 3 after the title because they are on the third eponymous PG album.

Review: Joan Baez I Am A Noise

Also: Stop Making Sense

 
I know much about Joan Baez, a preeminent folk singer of the 1960s and beyond. But seeing the new documentary Joan Baez I Am A Noise, I discovered I didn’t realize the half of it.

 Early in the film, we see an intriguing quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” While I knew a lot about her public life, her private life, including her relationships with her parents and two sisters and a romance I had not heard about, was revelatory.

As for the secret life, THAT was a heady and sometimes painful exploration.

 To understand Joan, the moviemakers took illustrations and diary entries of her at 13. The teen, who grew up with a Quaker background, experienced a fair amount of prejudice growing up with Mexican heritage on her paternal side. Young Joan wrote: “When I think of God, I think of the earth as a very small thing then I think of myself as hardly a speck…might as well spend time making the less fortunate specks in the world enjoy themselves.”

So, when she started experiencing some success, she may have appeared calm and serene. Inside, she felt conflicted by guilt from her fame when so many others were far less fortunate. At the same time, it was fun, especially when she realized that her music was an entree into the activism she felt she needed to participate in.

Of course, there’s the Bobby Dylan section. Most folks don’t recall that she vouched for him on the music scene. They appeared together at the March on Washington in August 1963, but he was far less well-known then.
Save the world
Ultimately, she was addicted to activism in many forms. Her relationships with like-minded folks like David Harris (m. 1968-1973) could not work. She acknowledges that her son suffered from her being on the road so often.

One of the fascinating elements in her helping to develop the story was a shed full of tapes she visits. You can see it in this CBS Sunday Morning segment.

She eventually grew closer to her older sister Pauline (d. 2016) and younger sister Mimi (d. 2001), even as they investigated unpleasant fragments of their growing up. At 82, Joan Baez is more at peace now, accepting the lower range of her voice.

38 of 39 Rotten Tomatoes reviews were positive. The outlier was Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle” “The impression that comes through is that the filmmakers were too in awe of Baez to press her — or to seek alternate opinions — and so we’re left with a sense of not getting the whole truth.” I do not know what film he saw.

The audience score was only 80% positive because I believe this was not entirely the feel-good film they may have been expecting. Young Joan once wrote in a journal, “I am not a saint. I am a noise.”  My wife and I saw the film at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.
This ain’t no disco.
During the same week, and at the same venue, we also saw Talking Heads’ 1983 concert film Stop Making Sense. I cannot reasonably review this movie.

As I’ve said numerous times, that tour, which included a stop at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center about 30 miles north of Albany, proved to be one of my two most extraordinary musical experiences.

But I had never seen the Jonathan Demme film before. I can say that the first half of the movie transported me back four decades, with the attendant awe, from Byrne’s solo Psycho Killer to the pieces with the full band, including Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell, and Steve Scales. Honestly, I was joyfully exhausted by the band and backup singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry’s energy.

I met Lynn when she and my first niece Rebecca Jade sang backup for Sheila E. at the New York State Fair in Syracuse in 2019. It was all I could do to contain myself from rambling to Lynn about how great the show was that I’d seen 36 years earlier.

The next venue in the film brought me back to mere enjoyment, but it ended strong.
 

Ironweed’s 40th, Lux aeterna, RISSE fundraiser, FFAPL gala

Requiem and other texts

Here are four events coming in the next month that I want to plug. I avoid noting these here because most people reading my blog don’t live in New York State’s Capital District. Still, they’re all events I have a special attachment to. I’ve mentioned the last one before.

The NYS Writers Institute is celebrating Ironweed’s 40th anniversary with the first-ever marathon public reading of the novel written by Albany’s native son, William Kennedy, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and put the author’s hometown on the literary map.

The special event will begin at noon and continue through 8 p.m. on WEDNESDAY, November 1 (NOT Thursday, Nov.1, as the flier suggests.)

“It will be hosted at the Albany Distilling Co. Bar and Bottle Shop, maker of Ironweed whiskey, at 75 Livingston Ave. in the North Albany neighborhood where the author grew up and where some of the fictional scenes in the Depression-era narrative set in 1938 take place.”

To sign up for a time slot as a volunteer reader, visit: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C084AAFA72FA3FAC52-45194995-albany#/

The final chapters of Ironweed will be read on stage by the novel’s author and invited VIP guest readers, beginning at 7 p.m. at Capital Repertory Theatre, 251 N. Pearl St., adjacent to Albany Distilling Co. Reservations are required. Go to: https://capitalrep.org/event/ironweed/

The ticket prices are a donation of $10, $25 or $50. All proceeds will go to benefit the food pantry and free meal outreach at Sacred Heart Church, 33 Walter St. in Albany, which was Kennedy’s parish when he was growing up.

“The novel takes place across three days — All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls Day — in the jagged, heartbreaking journey of Francis Phelan, an alcoholic vagrant and former Albany professional baseball player.”

Neighborly

Refugee and Immigrant Support Services of Emmaus (RISSE) Annual Fall Fundraiser: Homecoming Open House

Sunday, November 12th, 2023, 2:00 – 4:00 pmRISSE, 715 Morris Street, AlbanyJoin RISSE as “we celebrate our newest neighbors and the newcomers who have made the Capital Region their home. The event will showcase performances and food from a variety of cultures from around the world.

“Learn more about RISSE, our partner agencies, and our collective work welcoming refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers to the Capital Region.”

Click Here to Register Now!

This event is free and open to the public. However, donations are appreciated and encouraged.

Lux Aeterna is a 1997 five-movement piece by Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) perform. As First Pres’ music director, Michael Lister, noted: “It is a sensitive and moving setting of the Requiem and other texts and will be a time for us as a community to remember and honor those of who we have lost from our community over the several past years.”

First Presbyterian Church is located at 362 State Street, Albany, at the corner of Willett Street, across from Washington Park.  There is parking on the street and in the park. The music will be in the sanctuary on Friday, November 3, at 6 p.m., while the art display in the adjacent room will start at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. 

Century

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library (FFAPL) look forward to seeing you on Saturday, October 21st, as we celebrate 100 years of the Albany Public Library!  The Centennial Celebration will be held at the newly-expanded Café Madison at 1108 Madison Ave. Albany, NY, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. Cocktail attire is suggested. Tickets are available via the link above.

The evening will feature music, a silent auction, a mystery wine pull, stationed hors d’oeuvres, and an open bar. FFAPL has partnered with Harding Mazotti’s Rideshare Home Program to provide free rides home from the event! Scan a QR code at the event to get a free Uber voucher for pick up at Café Madison (Up to $200).

If you plan on driving to the event, street parking and nearby parking lots are available after-hours, including the Pine Hills Library.

If you are not able to attend the event but would like to support Albany Public Library, please check out the online auction showcasing unique products and experiences from local businesses.

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