Oops & Oops & Oops (Including My Own Oops)

Originally posted July 08, 2009:

A few years ago, I was reading a novel – not a very good one, but the book came recommended by a friend and I persevered – about five or so young women and their lives in the 1970s and beyond. The group of women had a secret, and it had to do with something that took place the night of their graduation from high school in the spring of 1970.

And in one of the early scenes in that book, on that graduation night, two or more of the women heard the sounds of a song from a nearby radio. They heard Janis Joplin singing “Me and Bobby McGee.”

I damn near threw the book across the room. Instead, I just shook my head and read on.

Why was I annoyed? Because “Me and Bobby McGee” – along with the rest of Pearl, the album from which it came – wasn’t recorded until the summer and autumn of 1970. I knew that at the time, but this morning, just to make sure, I went to All-Music Guide. The album, says AMG, was recorded between July and October of 1970 and was released in February of 1971. There’s no date for the single at AMG. Another source, a book called The Great Rock Discography, has both the album and the single being released in January 1971. I’m not sure whether January or February is correct, but either way, it’s 1971, not 1970.

Now, I make mistakes, some of them doozies. (As will be clear later in this post.) But I try my best to nail down historical details when I write, here and elsewhere. And I think any writer dealing at all with historical material – whether it’s five hundred years ago or five years ago – owes it to his or her readers to get it as accurate as possible. I grant you, it’s easier these days to verify when an album was recorded and released than it used to be; a few clicks of the mouse to AMG (which does have some errors but is generally reliable), and there you go. Those types of tools weren't available when the book in question was written, which I would guess was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

But even if the author of the book in question were writing twenty years ago, in 1989, all he or she – I long ago forgot the author’s name and even the title of the book – would have to do is jot down a note: “Bobby McGee release date?” and head down to the local library to find a copy of the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. My first copy, which was published in 1987, was the third edition. And there we’d learn that “Me and Bobby McGee” first reached the Top 40 on February 20, 1971. And that should be enough to tell a writer that hearing “Me and Bobby McGee” coming from a radio in the spring of 1970 would be extremely unlikely. And that, I would think, would be enough for the writer to choose another song.

My point is: Even twenty years ago, it would only have taken a little bit of effort to make that small detail correct, to find a song that would have been likely to be heard on the radio on a graduation night in the spring of 1970. The fact that the writer (and the editors who worked on the book, too; they should not be excused, either!) did not take that effort to check on an easily verifiable historical fact always makes me wonder what other corners the writer cut.

(That’s a far more grievous error to make in non-fiction, of course, and I have seen a few books over the years that have erred in writing about things I know about, generally records, movies and sports events. I usually just grunt in annoyance and read on, wondering what other facts are wrong.)

The long-ago book that misplaced Janis Joplin’s great single came to mind last evening because of a similar error I found, this time by an author who is generally pretty good at such stuff: I was reading the first novella in Dean Koontz’ collection Strange Highways, in which a man gets a second chance at a crucial night in his youth, somehow shifting from 1995 to 1975. As he marvels that Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run is new that year, he also notes that Jim Croce is still alive. Oops. Croce died in the autumn of 1973. Again, I shook my head and moved on, disappointed that a simple detail evidently wasn’t checked.

Maybe I seem old, out-of-date, out of style and crotchety. But details matter. Accuracy matters. So, for that matter, does spelling. And so does grammar. I may someday come back to those latter two things as a topic for a post, but for now, the lecture is over.

In an attempt to connect to the music I’ve selected for today, however, I’m going to touch on one grammatical error that’s horribly common and that makes my ears hurt as much as does the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard (a reference that likely dates me, too). I mentioned it the other day in connection with the Doors’ song “Touch Me.” In that song’s chorus, Jim Morrison sings, in part, “I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky for you and I.” That should be “you and me.” How do we know that? Well, pull out the words “you and” and then see what kind of sentence you have: “I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky for I.” Oops again.

The BoDeans’ songwriters, Sam Llanas and Kurt Neumann, do the same thing in another song I like, “Good Things,” when they wrote “good things for you and I.”

I know that in both of those cases, using “me” would have messed up the rhyme. Too bad, but both choruses needed more work. I also know that there are times when I screw up grammatically. (I still wonder about a sentence the other day when I couldn’t decide whether to use past tense or the subjunctive. [And I can see eyes rolling all over blogword.]) I think I generally do pretty well, though, and I also think that I almost always get “you and me” correct, as do these six songs. (Well, not all of those songs do. I was in a hurry and I screwed up. Oops, indeed.)

A Six-Pack of You and Me
“You and Me (Babe)” by Ringo Starr from Ringo [1973]
“You and Me” by Neil Young from Harvest Moon [1992]
“You and Me” by the Moody Blues from Seventh Sojourn [1972]
“You and Me” by Lighthouse from Thoughts of Movin’ On [1972]
“You and Me” by Aretha Franklin from Spirit In The Dark [1970]
“You and Me Of The 10,000 Wars” by the Indigo Girls from Nomads, Indians, Saints [1990]

I don’t have a lot to say about any of these. The Ringo Starr track was the last track on Ringo and caps off that very good album pretty well. The Moody Blues’ track is pretty strong musically and has one of the better lines from all the Moodies’ songs of cosmic consciousness: “All we are trying to say is we are all we’ve got.” Neil Young’s “You and Me” is a sweet song that comes from his revisitation of the style and themes of 1972’s Harvest.

The Indigo Girls’ track is, as might be expected, a literate exploration of a relationship’s struggles. Aretha Franklin’s “You and Me” was actually billed as by “Aretha Franklin With The Dixie Flyers.” (Listen for the swooping French horns at the 2:30 mark.) And the Lighthouse selection was on a pretty good record that was a few albums removed from One Fine Morning, which sparked the great single of the same title.

Aretha, Roger Miller & The New Vaudeville Band

Originally posted July 09, 2009:

Still feeling silly after yesterday’s post, I submerged myself in videos at YouTube. And there I found an old and somewhat visually deficient clip of Aretha Franklin performing “You and Me” on an episode of The Flip Wilson Show. The show ran from 1970 into 1974, but I think it’s a good bet that the episode in question comes from late 1970 or early 1971, right about the time “Border Song (Holy Moses)/You and Me” showed up in the lower level of the Top 40 charts (No. 37).



Here’s an interesting video set: Two performances of “King of the Road” by Roger Miller. One, says the person who posted the video, came from a 1969 lip-synch appearance on Music Scene, and the other, a 1964 performance, was on what the poster called “TNT.” British shows? Contrasting the two visuals is pretty entertaining, and in the 1969 clip, Miller does some nifty shuffling as he heads back down the blue road at the end of the tune.



Readers might recall my noting Tuesday that when “Winchester Cathedral” became a hit in late 1966, originator Geoff Stephens had to put together a group to be the New Vaudeville Band. Well, here’s a look at the group he put together, lip-syching “Peek-A-Boo” and “Winchester Cathedral” on The Hollywood Palace. The clip is most likely from early 1967; “Peek-A-Boo” reached its peak position –No. 72 – on the Billboard Hot 100 during the first week of March of that year. Whenever it was, the fellows look pretty bored with the proceedings. (And yes, I believe that is Kate Smith introducing theboys.)



That’s it for today. I’m not at all sure what’s going to be in this space tomorrow – I have several ideas, one of which may blossom – but there will be something here. Thanks for stopping by.

Johnny Rivers, Jim Webb & A Balloon Movie?

Originally posted July 10, 2009:

I got an interesting note yesterday. It turns out that the writer, Ted, had happened upon my corner of blogworld during the course of some research. He said he’s part of a small group that shares information, speculation and commentary about music.

One of the recent topics was a 5th Dimension song:

“I did ‘Up, Up and Away’ the other day, talking a little bit about Jim Webb writing ‘Up, Up and Away’ at the request of Johnny Rivers for the 5th Dimension. One commenter . . . indicated that he had once heard that Johnny Rivers might have been involved in a balloon movie - which was never made but may have influenced his conversation with Jim Webb - or alternatively that Jim Webb may have been commissioned directly to write a balloon song for this movie that never happened.”

And Ted said he’s wandered around the Web and couldn’t find anything that pertained to “Up, Up and Away” and actual ballooning. He asked me if I knew anything about it. I replied, saying that I’d never heard that tale. “That doesn't mean it's not true,” I said. “I just don't have it in the memory banks.”

And I told Ted that I’d ask my readers – who, I told him, “know far more than I do by myself” – if any of them had any information about Jim Webb, Johnny Rivers, a ballooning movie and the song “Up-Up and Away.” So, does anyone know anything about that?

And while you ponder that, here’s a mostly random selection of early 5th Dimension tunes. (In this case, “mostly random” means that I selected the starting tune and the ending tune and switched the order of the random selections in between.)

A Six-Pack of the 5th Dimension
“Up-Up and Away” from Up, Up And Away [1967]
“California Soul” from Stoned Soul Picnic [1968]
“The Magic Garden” from The Magic Garden [1967]
“Hideaway” from The Age of Aquarius [1969]
“Good News” from Stoned Soul Picnic [1968]
“Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)” from The Age of Aquarius [1969]

Saturday Single No. 140

Originally posted July 11, 2009:

I was going to say that there was a knock on the door last evening about 5:40, but there wasn’t. Just as I entered our small front porch to turn on our outside light, I saw our company for the evening coming up the steps. So before they even had a chance to knock, I opened the door and admitted our guests, JB of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ and his Missus, visiting St. Cloud from Madison, Wisconsin.

The idea for the visit popped up sometime in the early months of the year, when it became apparent that a cousin of The Missus would be playing in a golf tournament in Blaine, Minnesota (a megasuburb north of the Twin Cities) during the second week in July. JB emailed me or left me a message on Facebook, or maybe both, and we two couples began planning.

But in a larger sense, the preparation for last night’s meeting in real life began just more than three years ago when I first came across the world of music blogging. I’d simply been looking for more information about a 1965 LP and happened to find a Google link to a blog whose owner had ripped and uploaded the record as mp3s. I happily downloaded, all the while thinking “People do this stuff?”

And when I finished gathering in the mp3s, I began to click links, wandering – as one does – from one blog to the next. And about five clicks in, I happened upon a blog that was very different from the ones I’d been seeing. Here was a guy writing about music and how it intersected his life, about how single records spoke to him, sometimes after more than thirty years, and about how his life had spoken back to those records.

Once I mastered the navigation, I bookmarked the blog, and then clicked back to the beginning of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’. And over the next few days, I read every entry on that blog from the beginning, nodding knowingly at the tales from the intersection of life and music and thinking to myself, “Geez, I could do this. Maybe not this well, but I could do this.”

And not long after I got my USB turntable and began to share music I’d ripped, I stopped by JB’s blog and left a comment about something he’d posted and then invited him to stop by Echoes In The Wind. He did, leaving a complimentary comment, and from that first set of comments grew a chain of comments and emails in the digital world that led to our meeting in the corporeal world last evening.

We sat for a while, sipping beverages and just chatting as dinner baked, and then over dinner (one of the Texas Gal’s better recipes, a Texmex dish called King Ranch Casserole), continued to get to know each other, telling tales and laughing.

But JB and I, we both realized during the course of the evening (and we both had suspected this beforehand), already knew each other pretty well. Both of us write a lot about our lives on our blogs, and having read each other’s blog for the past two-plus years, we each already knew a lot about the other’s history and how he felt about a wide range of topics, music prime among them.

“There are forty million music blogs out there,” JB said last night as we sat in my study and talked about beer, blogging and life, “but very few of them do what we do.” We use our lives, he said, as a starting point to talk about the music that moves us, and there are very few blog writers who do that.

That fit in with something I’d realized the other evening when Rob stopped by for a few beers: as we talked, I told him that I sometimes feel as if I’m writing my autobiography, one post at a time. He nodded. “That’s exactly what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m surprised it took you this long to figure it out.”

And JB agreed with Rob’s assessment (though he didn’t express the same surprise at the slowness of my recognition): We are both writing our memoirs as we blog, able to hang those memoirs on the hook of music because music has been such a crucial portion of our lives.

Along with the blogging, however, has come something unexpected for both of us: Connecting with others out there. “We heard so much,” JB said, “that the ’Net and blogging was going to leave us all in our little rooms, disconnected from one another.” The truth, he said, and his experience parallels mine, is that he’s found more connections – with other bloggers, with the musicians he writes about and with readers – than he’d ever imagined.

The evening progressed: We shared stories and sipped beer. (He’d brought along samples of five Wisconsin beers and one from Michigan; I’d supplied three local brews and one from a West Coast brewery.) And all evening, it felt like the Texas Gal and I were entertaining old friends whom we’d know for years, even though they’d physically crossed our threshold for the first time last evening.

As the evening ended, we all four decided that the First Joint Minnesota/Wisconsin Music Blog Summit & Beer Spree, as JB dubbed it, had been a success. And we decided that the Texas Gal and I will visit Madison sometime soon.

Early during the evening, I had JB reach up into the unplayed LPs and pull one out, planning on using its fourth track as today’s share. Unhappily, I learned this morning that the album Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 has too much surface noise for me to be comfortable sharing her rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” So I went back to the spot where JB had grabbed the album and pulled out the next record. And here’s today’s Saturday Single:

“Woman” by Pure Prairie League from Pure Prairie League [1972]

When History Came Alive

Originally posted July 13, 2009:

On a late winter day many years ago, I wandered up a slight hill and through the gate of the Tower of London, the complex that has served for more than nine hundred years as fortress, residence, bank vault, jail and more. The Tower was the fourth stop of the day for me. I recall being interested, even fascinated in the historic things I was seeing: a Seventeenth Century home, a monument to the 1666 Fire of London, bits and pieces from Roman settlements in the basement of a church. But it was like reading old stories. There were stones and walls and chairs and inscribed dates. Nothing seemed alive.

And then I came to Tower Green, an open space inside the tower walls. I stopped at a small sign near a plaque in the pavement, and I read:

On this site stood a scaffold on which were executed:

Queen Anne Boleyn 1536
Margaret, Countess of Salisbury 1541
Queen Catherine Howard 1542
Jane Viscountess Rochford 1542
Lady Jane Grey 1554
Robert Devereux Earl of Essex 1601
also near this spot was beheaded Lord Hastings 1483

I looked at the names on that simple sign, a few of which I recognized – the crowned queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard and the uncrowned queen Lady Jane Grey – though I knew very little of their stories. And I looked at the shiny metal plaque set inside a quadrangle of chains.

In even the most average and quiet of lives, I imagine that there are moments when those lives shift, moments that one can look back at and say, “I changed right then.” My life has had more than a few of those moments, and I’ve written about some of them. But only a very few of such moments were more important to me than the few seconds it took for me to read that very plain sign and look at the plaque that marked the site of the scaffold.

“Blood flowed here,” I thought. As I had that thought, history ceased to be simply names and dates in books; it became people, those men and women whose lives had intersected for good or ill – mostly for ill, in that place I was standing – with the lives of those who were greater or at least more powerful.

Since that moment, I have probably read history more frequently than anything else (although I do still enjoy plenty of fiction). For a time, I dug into World War II and the Holocaust. The exploration and the settling of the American West – especially, for some reason, the Mormon migration from Illinois to what became Utah – caught my attention for a while. I’ve dabbled in ancient Egypt and dug into the end of the Romanov dynasty during the Russian Revolution. I find myself drawn, as I was when I was very young, to the American Civil War.

And recently, I’ve been teased by a television series into the idea of examining the very era that triggered my fascination with history. And that statement will launch a side trip:

A couple of weeks ago, the Texas Gal called our our cable and internet provider from her office and asked if it were possible for both our computers – my desktop and her laptop – to run from the same modem, mine via landwire and hers as a wireless. The answer was yes, and the woman on the phone told the Texas Gal that she could disconnect our standard modem immediately. “No, no, no!” said the Texas Gal, explaining that I was using the standard modem, adding that any disconnection should only come after we’d moved the wireless modem to where my computer resides and connected my machine to the wireless modem via the landwire.

Of course, within five minutes, my Internet access went away. I called and was told my wife had ordered the access disconnected. Damn, I thought, I really made her angry about something! When she came home as I was on the phone with our provider, she sighed resignedly and said, “I knew they were going to do that, even though I told them not to, twice.” After a brief conversation, my access was restored, and we made plans to move the wireless modem during the next weekend. The next morning, my access was gone once more for the same nonexistent reason. And when I called to complain and explain, the firm’s representative apologized, reactivated my line and offered us all the premium cable channels free for a year.

Now, back to the original story: That evening, I came across the third-season premiere of The Tudors, the tale of King Henry VIII of England as told by Showtime. And I was fascinated. Often bawdy, often bloody, it seems to be fairly accurate historically, and I’ve been catching up on the first season through our DVD service. And when I finish the current pile of books in my study, I think I’m going to dig a little bit into Tudor England and learn a little more about those unfortunates – and about the people and life around them – whose lives ended so many years ago at that place that changed my life.

A Six-Pack of Queens
“Black Queen” by Stephen Stills from Stephen Stills [1970]
“Little Queenie” by the Rolling Stones from 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!' [1970]
“Witch Queen of New Orleans” by Redbone, Epic 10746 [1971]
“Caddo Queen” by Dobie Gray from Drift Away [1973]
“Mississippi Queen” by Mountain, Windfall 532 [1970]
“Gypsy Queen, Part One” by Gypsy from Gypsy [1970]


Note: The fairly plain sign I saw at Tower Green was replaced sometime later with a more detailed sign, further identifying the individuals executed and providing a date as well as a year of execution. And the spelling of one of the names was changed, from “Catherine Howard,” when I saw it, to “Katherine Howard” on the more detailed sign. In recent years, the site of the plain sign and plaque has been marked by a fairly ornate monument. I read in one of the documents linked at the monument page that the temporary scaffold on which those victims died was built at various locations over the years. So it’s still likely that blood flowed nearby, if not exactly at the place where I stood many years ago.

Some Time Off

Originally posted July 14, 2009:

The Texas Gal is taking a few days off, so I’m going to do the same. See you Saturday, maybe Friday.

“Take the Time” by the Freddy Jones Band from Waiting for the Night [1993]

Saturday Single No. 141

Originally posted July 18, 2009:

I’m a newsman, a reporter. I always have been and always will be. I haven’t made my living in that trade for more than ten years now, but still, I am one. I didn’t have much of an audience for the hand-printed newspapers I put together when I was twelve or so, but even then I was a newsman (or newskid, if you will). As someone whose life is tied to the news – and that will always be the case, even if I never work another minute in the industry – there are those who have influenced me on my path.

Chief among those is DQ, my first real-world editor at the Monticello Times. DQ taught me almost everything I know about newspapering in a small town. Explicitly, through his instruction, and implicitly, through his behavior and demeanor, he showed me how to be what I eventually realized I’d always wanted to be: a reporter.

The fact that I wanted – and had always wanted – to be a reporter surprised me. Writing – one of the essential portions of reporting – had always been a chore: Until I got a typewriter and mastered it, my thoughts moved far too fast for my horrid handwriting to keep pace. And even with more and more modern tools, there still are days when writing is hard work. Add to that the tasks of first, going out and talking to strangers to learn what they know and think and second, finding a way to tell all of that to an audience, and reporting is a craft that can be complex and scary. And I’ve wondered from time to time where that impulse arose: Who or what in my youth made me – despite my dread of writing and my uneasiness as having to face strangers throughout the process – want to be a reporter?

I think I got my answer last evening, and that answer – as delayed as its realization might have been – was ultimately as unsurprising as the sunrise. My inspiration was Walter Cronkite, the grand man of television news who died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. From World War II through the Iranian hostage crisis of the later 1970s and early 1980s, Cronkite was first and foremost a reporter, even during the nineteen years when he was the anchor for the CBS Evening News.

That was evident last evening in many of the clips that CNN showed as it covered Cronkite’s death. Among the many on-air moments of his life that were shown last evening, we saw him discussing Vietnam with President John F. Kennedy in the backyard at (one assumes) the Kennedy retreat at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and talking about the D-Day invasion with retired general and one-time President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy, France. We saw him at his anchor desk explaining the intricacies of the Watergate affair in late 1973, delving into a story that did not, at that time in its development, lend itself well to the visual medium that is television news. And we saw perhaps the two most famous moments of Cronkite’s long career: his exultation and relief in July 1969 when the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle found a safe landing spot on the moon and his controlled shock and grief in November 1963 as he told his viewers of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

As I watched those clips – all of which I’d seen before and some of which I’d seen at the moment of broadcast – I realized that from the time I began to watch television news (and that was at a very young age, perhaps when I was ten ), I always by choice watched CBS and Cronkite. (Cronkite was followed on CBS, of course, by Dan Rather, who was himself succeeded by Katie Couric. I don’t think much of Couric, but I still watch CBS; brand loyalty dies hard.) I realized as well that it was Cronkite who – without my ever coming close to realizing this before – gave me a model of what a newsman should be: As he reported and presented the news, he was calm, well-spoken (which means he also wrote well), courteous but persistent, interested in just about everything, and a good story-teller.

Cronkite’s passing is truly the end of an era, as has been said many times by many people on CNN and elsewhere in the brief hours since his death. I’ll let others deal with the historical implications and with the contrast of the news environment of, say, 1969 to that of 2009. My reaction is far more personal, and it’s far more intense than I would have expected.

I don’t know that I ever had heroes, even when I was a kid. I don’t think I ever thought of anyone as someone who could do no wrong, which is to me the definition of a hero. Over the years, however, from the time I was very young through my college years (and probably beyond), I did have role models, folks whose best attributes and actions seemed to me worthy of emulation: A couple of them were teachers, for the way they guided me and encouraged me; I’ve written once about Roger Lydeen and I may write about others in the future. Musically, as I’ve also said before, there were Al Hirt, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. As a sports fan, I looked up to Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings. And, as I noted above, I realized last evening – with some surprise and some tears – that Walter Cronkite was on that list as well.

I would imagine that Walter Cronkite shows up on a lot of folks’ similar lists, especially among those of us who consider ourselves newsmen and –women.

And here’s a song whose content has no relation to my topic but whose title fits, today’s Saturday Single:

“I Got The News” by Steely Dan from Aja [1977]