The Singer, He Looks Angry at Being Thrown to the Lions

On December 16, 1978, the musical guest on NBC's Saturday Night Live was Peter Tosh, but when he came out to sing his first song, there was a second vocal mike next to his own. And a few notes in, out trotted Mick Jagger to sing along on "Don't Look Back." (I still remember going to school the following Monday and having our social-studies teacher turn to us in the middle of class and ask, "Was that Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live?," as if a bunch of eighth graders would know that better than she would, although I guess we did.) Jagger was a longtime fan and friend of Tosh's. Tosh had recently been signed to Rolling Stones Records, and Jagger sang on the recorded version of "Don't Look Back" as well.

This was a mere two months after the Stones' disappointing appearance in the fourth season opener, and one wonders if Mick was trying to atone for that. Whatever the reason, the Stones have never been back to SNL, although Jagger has appeared as a solo act twice: in 1993, with Luke Perry hosting, and in 2001, with Hugh Jackman hosting.

Actually, it's a bit of a surprise that Jagger and the Stones haven't been on more. He's been friendly with Lorne Michaels for a long time. "I slept on Lorne's couch for a couple of weeks, long before the show ever started, and one day I came in and Mick Jagger was sitting there - in Lorne's apartment, on the couch," said production assistant Neil Levy in Live From New York. "I don't know how Lorne knew Mick Jagger, because at that point he wasn't even 'Lorne Michaels.'"

Just Another Band Out of Boston

Speaking of Casey Kasem, on January 15, 1972, he talked about a band that was getting much mention as America's answer to the Rolling Stones. He cited two rock writers, from San Francisco and Sacramento, who had made an explicit comparison between the raunch and blues of this new group and the Stones. Then he played the new hit from this five-man band out of Boston:

"Lookin' for a Love," by the J. Geils Band. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Give Me the Chance to Make You See

I believe that the general quality of popular music suffered a serious decline in the late 1970s. One way you can measure this, since quality in popular music is a rather subjective concept, is by looking at what kind of staying power the hits of the time had. I recently listened to an installment of Casey Kasem's "American Top Forty" from Jaunary 1978, and there was hardly anything in there that people still listen to.

To take two artists that everyone is familiar with, Wings, a band headed by former Beatle Paul McCartney, was on the charts that week with "Girls' School." Further down the countdown, Diana Ross had a hit with "Gettin' Ready for Love." No one has heard either of these songs since 1978.

"Baby Come Back," by the band Player, was at Number One that week, and would be for three weeks, despite the fact that no one at that time or at any time since has been able to tell it apart from Exile's "Kiss You All Over."

I see here that Player's bassist, Ronn Moss [sicc], played Ridge Forrester on the daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful. I'm sure he appreciated the extra scratch.

Mano a Mano

The photograph at the right shows the two chief competitors for the 100-meter dash at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The runner on the left, competing for the United States, ended up winning, while the runner on the right - who had taken the gold in that event four years earlier - came in second as the representative from Poland.

Shortly after the race, the gold medalist was accused of cheating - it was alleged that she, Helen Stephens of Fulton, Missouri, was actually a man. Near as I can figure, the test for this sort of thing back in 1936 consisted of taking the entrant under the bleachers and having him or her drop trou. Stephens passed and got to keep her gold medal.

One wonders if the silver medalist, Stella Walsh, would have been so lucky. She was born Stanislawa Walasiewicz in Poland, but her family moved to Cleveland when she was three months old. She was a track star by the time she was in her late teens, and won gold in the 100 meters to Los Angeles in 1932, when she was 21. She had along career as an athlete, married a boxer named Neil (or Harry) Olson when she was 36, divorced him in two months, then settled in as an employee of the Cleveland Parks Department.

In 1980, when Stella was 69, she was killed in an armed robbery in Cleveland. An autopsy showed that she had male sex organs. The immediate assumption on the part of a lot of people was that she had passed herself off as a woman all those years in order to compete in track. Her story was included in a rather meanspirited book called The 25 Greatest Sports Conpsiracy Theories of All Time, which noted, "Olson was obviously in on her deception, and what he got out of it remains his secret."

But that's not the end of the story. Stella Walsh had no female sex organs, but she was given a girl's name as a baby, and raised as a girl, so she wasn't the only one who thought she might be female, and she wasn't exactly trying to put something over on people. "We knew this," one of her childhood friends told the Washington Post. "It was common knowledge that she had this accident of nature. She wasn't 100 percent pure female." Another recalled, "She asked me if God had done this to her."

After her death, someone looked up poor old Harry Olson. "I feel stupid as hell for marrying her," he said. He claimed they made love only "a couple of times, and she wouldn't let me have any lights on."

None of us is ever likely to know exactly what Stella Walsh had going on down there. According to the Washington Post, the coroner said she had "an underdeveloped and non-functioning penis, 'masculine' breasts and an abnormal urinary opening." It gives me the heebie-jeebies to even try to figure out what that all might mean. But jeez, someone who has to go through life like that deserves whatever they can get, including a couple of Olympic medals.

When Stella Walsh died, Prince's "Dirty Mind" was on the American R&B charts. If she had held on for four more years, she would have heard Prince voice a sentiment she would have been familiar with: "I'm not a woman/I'm not a man/I am something that you'll never understand."

And the Oscar Nomination Goes to...

I'm pleased to say that, at this point, sixteen hours or so after they were announced, I have no idea what any of the Academy Award nominations are. As much as I enjoyed working in entertainment journalism, it is nice to be able to not care about things you don't want to care about. I don't see very many new movies, although I have been watch a fair number of older ones, and I think the Oscars have merely a nodding acquaintance with actual filmic quality, so while sooner or later I'll find out who got nommed (and who got "snubbed," to use a word that gets more exercise at this time of year than at any other, as if the entire AMPAS body got together and decided they really wanted to rub Leonardo's face in it), for now I remain blissfully ignorant.

Thinking back, the only possible Oscar candidate I can remember seeing this year was Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, a movie which many critics fell over themselves praising but which no one really seemed to get, by which I mean no one saw it the way I did. It's a kind of fable about a theater director in upstate New York whose wife leaves him, which leads him in a roundabout way to move to New York City and, after getting a genius grant, trying to stage a play that is no more or less than a staging of life itself. It has Oscar potential because Charlie Kaufman is the kind of guy who gets noticed by the voters, and because it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, and I could probably make a decent movie if I was able to cast Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener in it.

What none of the reviews seem to have noticed is the scene near the beginning where Catherine Keener tells a marriage counselor that she's fantasized about what her life would be like if her husband, PSH, were dead. Shortly thereafter, she goes to Germany for an art exhibit she's presenting - and it's at that point, I feel, that the movie becomes one long fantasy in the mind of PSH about what would happen if Catherine Keener were to leave his life for good. (Which she does.)

I say this because while it had been very realistic up to that point, it falls totally off the rails then, with scenes showing off Kaufman's trademark whimsicality, like a house that is perpetually on fire. There's not a believable moment in the last three quarters of the film. And Hoffman goes through a variety of fantasies, many of them paranoid, like a rash that starts invading his body (and then gets dropped like a hot potato) or the idea that his daughter, now living in Germany, becomes famous as the youngest tattoo-covered person in the world (the only time PSH sees her from that point on is in a strip club), or that he eventually becomes Catherine Keener's housecleaner (although he never sees her again). There are also positive fantasies, such as that genius grant or the idea that he'd marry the terminally cute Michelle Williams.

But my reading of the movie is that all that stuff is taking place in Hoffman's head. It's a theater director casting and blocking his own life, from that point forward.

It's also boring as all get out, in the second half of it. Once Hoffman is involved with his life-sized play, the film is hugely repetitive, with doppelgangers doubling back on doppelgangers. You start praying for him to die, because you know that's the only way the film could possibly end. And that is how it ends, seemingly four hours after you went into the theater.

Still, Hoffman and Keener are great, as always, as was Samantha Morton as the woman who lives in the perpetually burning house (and marries the man who was living in the basement when she moved in, in another nod toward unreality). I should check to see if they got Oscar nominations.

Tonight's Musical Guest

We're probably getting very far into that area that no one cares about but me, but in the fourth season of NBC's Saturday Night Live, one thing they did a fantastic job on was selecting the musical guests. The season opened with a series of legendary but still highly regarded acts - the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, the Grateful Dead - alternating with the avant-garde in Frank Zappa and Devo. It's long way from the early days, when they had the likes of Libby Titus and Richard Baskin, or even when they had lightweight, easily forgotten pop acts like Leo Sayer and Eddie Money.

The Grateful Dead, of course, was pretty weak, doing their customary boring midtempo tunes ("Casey Jones," "I Need a Miracle," "Good Lovin'"). Van Morrison was great. Devo was much better on "Satisfaction" than on their own "Are We Not Men?," or whatever that's called. Deconstruction is much more effective when you have something to deconstruct.

But then they went off the rails by having their own personnel (they stopped being called the Not Ready for Prime Time Players in this season) appear as the musical guest two weeks in a row. First, with Carrie Fisher, the guest was the Blues Brothers, which felt like kind of a gyp back then, and still feels like it now. They were more of a vaudeville act than they were musicians. Then Walter Matthau said he wanted to have some Mozart on his show, so they got Garrett Morris to sing a lieder. Garrett's fine, but couldn't they have snagged Kiri Te Kanawa or somebody? Maybe they figured they'd save a few bucks, and nobody would have tuned in just to see Kiri Te Kanawa anyway.

Fixed!

We're back in business. Special thanks to friends of OPC Rick and MJN for calling in to help.

Help

I'm sorry to interrupt this blog's customary content with a plea for help with a personal problem: My desktop has disappeared. The files and shortcuts I normally have on my desktop are gone, and the taskbar along the bottom doesn't show up.

I'm running Windows XP on an eMachines laptop. If anyone has any clue about how to restore my desktop, please let me know. Thanks.

Berry Berry Good

Chico Escuela made his first appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live on the fifth show of the fourth season, hosted by Buck Henry, on November 11th, 1978. He wasn't filling his most famous position, as the sportscaster on "Weekend Update," but as the featured speaker at a St. Mickey's K of C dinner. Chico received a speaking fee of 900 bucks to deliver the following address:

"Thank you berry much. Baseball been berry berry good to me. Thank you. God bless you. Gracias... Keep you eye on de ball."

Chico was introduced as a former second baseman and shortstop for the Cubs, although later on, of course, he would be called a former Met, as illustrated by his tell-all memoir, Bad Stuff Bout the Mets. St. Mickey's, though, apparently is situated in someplace like Blue Island, Illinois, given the accents of the characters involved.

Does it seem possible that a sketch-comedy show would present something like the St. Mickey's K of C today? Do people even know what a Knights of Columbus is? The middle-aged blue-collar Catholics in those skits, so familiar to me, are presented not really as figures of fun but as recognizable characters. They are caricatured rather than lampooned. If someone did a skit about those people today, they'd have to make them reactionary pedophiles or something, to keep a fair distance from them. I can't imagine Will Ferrell presenting an affectionate portrait of some of his father's cronies the way John Belushi does in these skits.

Inaugural Notes, ctd.

So I guess for a few moments there, Joe Biden was vice-president serving under President George W. Bush. That's the kind of bipartisan spirit this nation needs.

Did Justice Roberts try to memorize the presidential oath? There's no reason to mess up the oath of office when you can have the words right there in front of you.

Well, we've got a new president. To me, the most impressive thing about him is how seriously he takes governing the country. We're gonna need that.