Hey, Hit the Highway

On John Cougar's first-ever hit, from 1979, the Hoosier poet mewls about how he needs "a lover that won't drive me crazy." Nee Mellencamp even further clarifies that that obscure object of desire would be "some girl," so we're definitely talking about a human here. You know what that means, Johnny? You need a lover WHO won't drive you crazy!

That kind of slipshod grammar would never fly here at OPC.

Dog Bites Alpo

Crawling across my computer screen yesterday was a headline reading: "Mickey Rourke Arrested for DUI." This belongs on the list of perennially unsurprising headlines along with:

"Cheney Remains Mum on Role in U.S. Attorney Scandal, Torture Decisions, Government in General"

"New Roxette Single Trite, Inexpressive"

"Hillary Clinton Does Something Trivial but Mockable"

"Yankees Sign Aging, Overpriced Player; 'This Won't Win the Series for Us,' Says Cashman"

"JM J. Bullock: Still Looking for Work"

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Wes Anderson

I recently re-watched the Wes Anderson movie The Royal Tenenbaums -- not, as you're probably thinking, on account of those commercials I wrote about a while back (the actor I mentioned, Larry Pine, is on display here as well, as the unctuous talk-show host Peter Bradley, a knockoff of Charlie Rose, although he's only in two scenes, one of which is a fleeting glimpse of him feeling up Gwyneth Paltrow in her wild-oats montage; the young man who plays the "I'm TEXTing... Mom" student, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is also here as a bellhop, albeit in a very brief appearance; on the DVD commentary, Anderson pauses to mention what a good actor he is and what a shame it was that they didn't give him more to do, which, no kidding, Wes, the guy is onscreen for like five seconds and if you hadn't pointed him out [he has frizzy hair here as opposed to his AT&T buzzcut], I never would have noticed him) but because my family had recently seen a stage version of E.L. Konigsburg's young-adult novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and I was reminded of Anderson's comment on the director's track of the Royal Tenenbaums DVD of how the brief passage near the beginning of the movie showing Margot and Richie Tenenbaum running away to a museum was inspired by From the Mixed-Up et cetera, in which two kids from Connecticut run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On a second viewing, I was struck by how much of the film comes across like a young-adult novel (which seems like a misnomer, as those books are generally read by something like 10- to 13-year-olds, who aren't anywhere close to adults). From the Kandy-Kolored design to the slightly askew version of New York City, the movie takes the format of a young-adult book -- literally, since each new section is introduced with a page from a book called, naturally, The Royal Tenenbaums. As I read it, the film basically takes a Y-A premise -- a family of three overachieving teens, with an entrepreneur, a playwright and a tennis ace -- and watches what happens to them as they peak too soon and settle into their miserable 30s. It's the kind of metaphor Anderson was living for a while, wearing suits that were a size and a half too small for him, although he seems to have outgrown that now. (Get it?) He's also helped along by a stellar cast of the quality Woody Allen used to be able to assemble; even Luke Wilson isn't half bad, although he kind of cheats a little by spending most of the movie in a stupor, hidden behind a headband, shades and a full beard.

The irony, though, is that it's jam-packed with suicide, drug addiction, incest, smoking, lesbianism, and plenty other old-adult motifs. There's even some racism, in that hilarious scene where Gene Hackman calls Danny Glover "Coltrane." Given co-writer Owen Wilson's recent troubles, perhaps it's no surprise that the Wilson-Anderson team thinks young-adult themes can live on only in art. And sometimes not even then.

Old Rivers

Johnny Rivers, one of the more underrated talents in the history of rock music, becomes eligible for Social Security today. John Ramistella was born in New York City on this date in 1942 but soon moved to Baton Rouge, where he grew up listening to Fats Domino and other titans of Louisiana music. He then moved to Los Angeles, seeking work as a songwriter and session musician alongside his friend and fellow Louisianan James Burton, and wound up as the headline singer when a brand-new club opened up on the Sunset Strip called the Whisky a Go Go.

Rivers was so popular at the Whisky that his manager, Lou Adler, decided to release a live album of his work there in 1964, a canny and unorthodox decision that deserves a lot more notice than it gets. James Brown released his Live at the Apollo in 1963, and Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips Pt. 2" was a live record in the summer of that same year, so maybe that had something to do with it, but putting those songs out on a live record infused them with a tremendous amount of energy. "Memphis," his first hit, still sounds fresh to me; I'm surprised that more pop acts didn't try putting out live records around that time. His best single, the unstoppable "Secret Agent Man" -- Rivers devised the sinuous opening guitar lick (the song was co-written by P.F. Sloan of "Eve of Destruction" fame) -- wasn't cut live, but they made it sound like it was.

After starting his own label, Soul City, Rivers the A&R man discovered Jimmy Webb (or at least claimed he did) and the Fifth Dimension. But what's most remarkable about Johnny Rivers are those early singles, where his vocal and the live sound make them wholly his own, even though they're mostly not just covers but covers of familiar hits. Here's Johnny (introduced by Judy Garland!) singing "Secret Agent Man" on Hollywood Palace:

Thomas Dawes, 1943-2007

Thomas Dawes, genius behind the mid-Sixties band the Cyrkle, dead at the age of 64. The Cyrkle was discovered by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, which is how the legend got started that John Lennon came up with their idiosyncratically spelled name, and how the Cyrkle came to open for the Beatles on their final tour in 1966. While one of the band members served a brief stint in the Coast Guard, Dawes played bass for Simon and Garfunkel on one of their tours, which is how Paul Simon came to offer them "Red Rubber Ball," which went to Number Two on the Billboard charts in the summer of 1966. (The Cyrkle supposedly later turned down Simon's offer of "59th Street Bridge Song.")

According to the obituary in my newspaper, "Red Rubber Ball" was the only hit for the Cyrkle, which is why, when it comes to obscure pop acts or long-term game-show guests, please, please, please, folks, turn to OPC first for your information before you go to the AP. "Turn Down Day" went to Number 16 in the fall of 1966, a song written by the team of Dave Blume and Jack Keller, about whom I know very little except that Blume also wrote the score for the Don Knotts film The Shakiest Gun in the West.

Dawes, who was the Cyrkle's bassist and co-lead singer, had written neither of the band's hits, but when they began to dissolve shortly after their second hit, he embarked on a career as a commercial jingle writer. He wrote "Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz," "Coke Is It," and several other tunes that were inescapable in the '70s and '80s. The Cyrkle did have one brief reunion for the occasion of -- I kid you not -- Hands Across America.

Taking Their Bouzouki and Going Home

It is with a heavy heart that I report that the Decemberists have been forced to cancel the remainder of their U.S. tour, which would have capitalized on their breakthrough record, The Crane Wife, as it wended through New York City, Los Angeles, and other significant American cities. Or maybe they weren't forced; it seems curious to me that the reasoning behind the cancellation is an unnamed illness suffered by an unnamed band member, and while the band members are certainly entitled to their privacy, well, it's just odd.

We here at OPC do appreciate the willingness of the Decemberists to dress up to have their picture taken, although the photo of them in Rolling Stone last year, clad in jockey wear, made keyswoman Jenny Conlee look, tragically, retarded. The Crane Wife, though, remains one of the most tiptop albums out there at this point, and with his grad-school lyrics, careful enunciation, and faux-New England accent (he's actually from Montana), songwriter and frontman Colin Meloy manages to sounds more than any other vocalist in pop music as if he's wearing glasses.

Let's Work

The other day on the radio I heard a song featuring the unmistakable vocals of Mick Jagger, but with a band that sounded far too loose to be the Rolling Stones, and sure enough, it was "Too Many Cooks," a Jagger solo joint from the early 1970s, produced in full "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" mode by none other than John Lennon. This horn-laden, swamp-thick R&B number was released, for the first time anywhere, on Jagger's recent solo best-of, bringing up the question, where has this tune been?

The song was cut in West Los Angeles, with a recording date given as either November 1973 or May 1974, during Lennon's extended Lost Weekend in Hollywood. I think it's great that two of the biggest stars in music would sit down in the studio and cut a record -- featuring a scorching vocal -- with a big-name band (Jim Keltner played drums, Bobby Keys played sax, Al Kooper played keyboards, etc.), yet have no plans to release it. (By the way, it amuses me to no end that among Lennon's drinking buddies during the Lost Weekend, alongside people like Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon, was none other than the Monkees' Micky Dolenz.)

On a videotape I have called "25 x 5: The Continuing Aventures of the Rolling Stones," Mick and Keith bicker over who abandoned the band for a solo project first. Mick put out his first solo album, She's the Boss, in 1985, which greatly irritated Keith, who always demanded fierce and total loyalty to the band. (After Mick Taylor, whom Keith didn't even like, quit the Stones, Keith thundered, "No one should leave this band except in a pine box," despite the fact that he and Mick had just fired Brian Jones a few years earlier, although in Brian's case, the pine box was not long in coming.) Mick countered that Keith had done his solo thing first with the New Barbarians, a short-lived band that formed to play a court-ordered charity concert in Toronto in 1979 after a Richards' drug bust and included Ronnie Wood and a few other Stones' hangers-on for a subsequent tour. But there was clear acrimony there.

I wonder if that's why "Too Many Cooks" never saw the light of day. Jagger had license to sing and make recordings but whether because of loyalty or outright fear, he didn't want to offend Keith by actually putting out a record.

If you haven't heard the song, here's a non-video video of it:

Great Moments in Coinage

John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson written in 1819, described the famous pamphlet Common Sense by Tom Paine as "poor, ignorant, malicious," and ultimately "crapulous."

No, I am not kidding.

Something Stupid

In last week's (sorry, I've been out of town) New York Times Book Review, whilst reviewing Pattie Boyd's memoir, Wonderful Tonight, Stephanie Zacharek brings up the old chestnut of how Frank Sinatra called George Harrison's "Something" the greatest love song of all time. (That's what Zacharek says; the way I heard it is that Frank called it the greatest love song of the past 50 years.) The only way I can rationally deal with this assertion is to assume that Frank was having a bit of a laugh on us. I certainly wouldn't include "Something" as one of the fifty greatest love songs of the last 50 years, and I love the Beatles, whereas Sinatra always considered rock & roll at best a mild irritant.

"Something"? The tune is lovely, and the opening line is pretty striking, but Harrison stole that from James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves." And after a while, the lyrics go straight downhill: "You're asking me will my love grow/I don't know, I don't know/You stick around now, it may show/I don't know, I don't know." Is this supposed to be the declaration of a great romance? If it is, could the singer at least act like he hopes maybe his love will grow?

When Sinatra performed this number, he didn't exactly treat it with the reverence one would accord to the greatest love song of whatever period we want it to be from. For one, he would attribute it to Lennon and McCartney, which some people would probably just ascribe to Frank being Frank, but Sinatra had tremendous respect and solid working relationships with many great writers, and not just writers from the past. (He recorded a whole album's full of songs by Rod McKuen, and his hit "There Used to Be a Ballpark" was written by "Sesame Street" scribe Joe Raposo.) If Sinatra really did admire "Something," he would have bothered to find out who wrote it.

Singing it, he would Sinatra-ize the lyrics: I've heard him sing "You stick around, Jack, it may show," coming down hard on the "Jack" like he was Jon Lovitz. That has got to be a put-on.

And finally, come on. Sinatra sang a lot of great love songs: "Night and Day," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," "I've Got a Crush on You," "Anything Goes"... OK, "Anything Goes" isn't a love song, but it's wonderfully kicky, isn't it? I'm barely scracthing the surface here; I suspect that Frank Sinatra recorded a hundred songs that were better love songs than "Something."

And that Frank knew it.

I Remember California

Highlights of my visit to Southern California this week:

* In-n-Out Burger really is that good. We went the other night at 8:30, and the line for the drive-through was out to the street. And it was totally worth it. I can't imagine why McDonald's or Wendy's can't make a cheesburger half as good as an In-n-Out Burger. I've only had one so far this week, but I have in the past made trips to SoCal where I ate an In-n-Out Burger every single day.

* California is the only place I know of where they refer to the highways with the definite article followed by the number of the road, e.g., the 405. In Chicago, for example, you could say "I-94," or "the Dan Ryan," but never "the 94." But it's surprisingly easy, and even a little bit fun, to say "the 101."

* There's not that much drama in the LBC.