Peace and Good, Brotherhood

I know, you're sitting there watching college football, wondering where in the world Tommy James ever came up with a name like Mony for hs song "Mony, Mony." He'd written and recorded the music for the song before he could come up with any lyrics for it, and there he sat, looking out the window, when he saw an ad for MONY -- Mutual of New York. "If I'd been looking in the other direction," Tommy later said, it would have been called 'Hotel Taft.'"

Tommy James was a pretty fascinating guy. He cut his first hit, "Hanky Panky," in 1962 with a bunch of fellow high schoolers, all recorded on one mike in a radio studio, a lot like the Kingsmen's infamous "Louie Louie" session. It became a regional hit around James' hometown of Niles, Michigan, and somehow found its way to Pittsburgh by 1965, where it became enough of a hit that a local bootlegger printed up 80,000 copies on his own. By the summer of 1966, four years after it was first cut, "Hanky Panky," by then on its third label, became a bona fide Number One hit. Tommy James had to recruit an entirely new group of Shondells at that point. (He ended up hiring an existing band called -- say it isn't so! -- the Raconteurs.) Tommy was all of nineteen years old.

And for a while after that, he could do no wrong: "I Think We're Alone Now," "Crimson and Clover," "Crystal Blue Persuasion." After their 1970 album Travelin', the Shondells broke up, and Tommy James retired briefly to a farm in upstate New York -- at the age of 23! He came back for the solo hit "Draggin' the Line" in 1971, and that was pretty much it. In 1987, Tiffany's cover of "I Think We're Alone Now" went to Number One, where it was followed immediately by Billy Idol's cover of "Mony, Mony."

Tommy James and/or the Shondells are not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, proving once again that that insitution would be better off it would give me more of a voice in the induction process.

Partners in Rhyme

David Bowie:

I'll stick with you, baby, for a thousand years
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years

What'sa matter, Ziggy, couldn't you come up with a rhyme for "years"? Try one of these: fears, tears, arrears (the Gratfeul Dead made good use of that one), Britney Spears (I guess that's not really eligible), three musketeers...

I'll stick with you, baby, after watching "Cheers"
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years

That's better, isn't it?

Bowie's still not as bad as Madonna and her inane rap for "Vogue" (which I still maintain originated as a poem she wrote on the back of her ninth-grade Social Studies folder), in which she rhymes two words with each other:

Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a pose, there's nothing to it

That's almost as brilliant as thinking Joe DiMaggio would have been on the cover of Vogue magazine.

The all-time champ of lazy rhyming, though, has to be Gewn Stefani and Moby in their song "South Side," wherein Gwen -- who is only singing the choruses, remember, not the verses -- uses the word "ride" nine times. It's still a pretty good song, though.

Terrible

I see where Dale Peck, the enfant terrible of literary criticism, has shown that he can be unfair and mean to even the writers he ostensibly likes. Writing this week in the New York Times Book Review about S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Peck presents a laundry list of writers Hinton was "influenced" by (wink, wink), going so far as to quote a passage from the book alongside a passage from a story by Shirley Jackson, who is one of Hinton's acknowledged influences, to make his case. Peck quotes from both authors:

First Jackson: “I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”

And now Hinton: “I have light-brown, almost-red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have.”

Peck's quick to back away from any sort of accusation, though: "Although such a strong resemblance between two works would probably be viewed with suspicion in this time of heightened alertness to plagiarism, this and other echoes strike me as crucial to the success of Hinton’s novel." This is wise, because what Hinton has done here is obviously not plagiarism; although Peck quotes entire paragraphs, the last half-sentence of each is the only place we can find an echo. Can you plagiarize half a sentence?

And that, other than Ponyboy mentioning a quick lyric from The Sound of Music, is the only real piece of borrowing that Peck is able to quote. But he's oh-so-impressed with himself for being able to play "spot the reference": "Ponyboy and Johnny curl up together for warmth like Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-Dick. Pony’s admonition to himself —'Don’t think' — is as Hemingway 'code hero' as it comes... And of course Pony, witness to and chronicler of his friends’ demise, could be the Midwestern cousin Nick Carraway left behind." Of course.

Why is Peck writing this, other than to show off all the literary references he knows? He can demur all he wants about how 17-year-old Susie Hinton didn't really do anything wrong, but he finishes up with this thought: "If some high-minded, plagiarism-wary reader had persuaded S. E. Hinton to remove all references to the books and movies that inspired her, The Outsiders probably wouldn’t have slipped past the internal (let alone official) censors that governed ’60s adolescence." Emphasis mine: Apparently the plagiarism is there if you're looking for it, although Peck himself hasn't been able to find it. If I ever write a book in which two people huddle together to keep warm, please remind me to keep it out of the hands of Dale Peck.

Maybe the Beach Boys Have Got You Now, With Those Waves Singing "Caroline, No"

Keith Moon loved the Beach Boys, but hated Pet Sounds.

Rocket From the Scrip

I don't know if you guys read the comments on here or not, but I felt this one was good enough to deserve its own post. Someone calling himself Rocket of Oz -- probably an alias -- had this to say about the Yankees all deciding to become friends of Dorothy:

Oh, I'd be tough and I'd be trouble
With an arm like ol' Carl Hubbell
And a brain like Oil Can Boyd's.
I'd be sly, I'd be sporty,
Winning Cy Youngs after 40
If I only had the 'roids!

I might pitch forever like Satchel,
No need to do it natch'l -
A fate that I'd avoid.
I could outlast Sabes and Gooden,
hit Piazza with something wooden,
If I only had the 'roids!

A Human to Sample and Hold

On his Theme Time Radio Hour this morning, one of the first shows of the program's second season (and doesn't that send a warm feeling throughout this great nation of ours), Bob Dylan played Neil Young's "Old Man," noting that it was from Harvest, which was Neil's best-selling album. He added, with a bit of puzzlement in his voice, "You mean it's not Trans?"

You gotta love that Bob.

I Wonder Where That Came From

So I've got another list of album titles, and the rule is this: The title of the album is the same as the title of a song on that album, but that song does not contain the title phrase. Got it? And the song has to have words to it, so don't go laying any Miles Ahead on me.

This is what I have so far:

Let It Bleed, the Rolling Stones (which I believe has been on every single one of these lists)

Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan

After the Gold Rush, Neil Young

Paranoid, Black Sabbath

Deja Vu, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Disintegration, the Cure

Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan

Here Come the Warm Jets, Brian Eno

My Pretties

The New York Yankees commemorated their loss to the Blue Jays on Monday by forcing the team's rookies to dress up like characters from The Wizard of Oz for their trip down to Tampa. A lot of teams do this on a lesser scale, forcing rookies to make a road trip in dresses or, as was the case with the Rockies, diapers, but for the Yanks, of course, money is no object, so you're looking at Joba Chamberlain in a pricey Cowardly Lion suit, followed by Phil Hughes as the Tin Man.

A poster named Guapo over at Baseball Primer got off the best line about this whole scenario: "I got really baked before today's game and watched it with the sound turned down and Dark Side of the Moon on. It synced up perfectly."

Marcel Marceau, 1923-2007

Marcel Marceau, mime, dead at the age of 84. According to his AP obituary: "Marceau was born Marcel Mangel on March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, France. His father, Charles, a butcher who sang baritone, introduced his son to the world of music and theatre at an early age. The boy adored the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers."

Um, what? The Marx Brothers' first full-length film was The Cocoanuts, in 1929, a talkie, although they did make a silent two-reeler back in 1921 called Humor Risk, which was apparently screened once, in the Bronx, then never opened in wider release; it was so bad that Groucho allegedly destroyed the negative after that first screening. At any rate, Humor Risk is lost now, and it certainly never made its way to Strasbourg.

Marceau's dying words were: "..."

It's Easy for Two People to Lose Each Other

In his sterling memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape, my friend Rob Sheffield writes that he found Nirvana's album MTV Unplugged in New York, which dropped shortly after his own wedding, to be all about marriage. This is certainly a novel way of looking at this record, which for me seemed to be mostly about despair, although that doesn't preclude it from also being about marriage. After noting that the set opens with Kurt singing "I do," on "About a Girl," Rob continues: "The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn't sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says.... I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn't see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn't be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie."

At the same time, I'm not sure what kind of lessons the rest of us are supposed to take away from the man who married Courtney Love, other than For God's sake, don't marry Courtney Love!

I was reminded of this while listening to Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love, which is pretty straightforwardly about marriage. What I love about Tunnel is not just that Bruce refuses to romanticize romance, but that he recognizes that if love is to exist and endure, it needs to negotiate its way around all the other problems of the day:

Woke up this morning my house was cold
Checked out the furnace she wasn't burnin'
Went out and hopped in my old Ford
Hit the engine but she ain't turnin'

When he comes around, in "Brilliant Disguise," to asking, "So when you look at me, you better look hard and look twice/Is that me, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?," you wonder if he's asking the question to his wife or to himself.

This album also reminds me of Elvis Presley's That's the Way It Is, which takes a similarly grownup view of marriage, seeing it as conducted around "Six o'clock, the baby will be crying" from "I've Lost You" and the "unpaid bills" in "Twenty Days and Twenty Nights." Noticing all the nagging details that add up to a lifetime, many of which eat away at the Valentine's Day romanticism of so many pop songs, adds tremendous depth to this kind of song. And no one's done that better than Bruce.

Springsteen had married Julianne Phillips on May 13, 1985, two years before he released Tunnel of Love. In the liner notes to that record, there is a brief mention of his bride, reading "Thanks, Juli." On that same record, Patti Scialfa sang backup on "Tunnel of Love," "One Step Up" and "When You're Alone."