All in the Family

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?, billed as a biography of the Carter Family, is actually two books in one. The first, about the original Carter Family of A.P. and Sara and Maybelle, is a gripping description of the hardscrabble backwoods of Virginny and the unearthly sounds that came from there, as well as of a somewhat unhappy family walking miles up and down the mountains just to visit their neighbors. A.P. is the driven one, pushing his little family to their recording sessions and traversing the backcountry in search of new old songs. Sara, his wife, is the cold fish who sings like no one else on earth but would rather perform in her living room than on the concert stage. Plus, she kind of hates A.P., has an affair with his cousin and eventually moves out on him and their children. Maybelle is the Appalachian Stevie Ray Vaughan, popping her bass string while she picks out intricate melodies up top. (I was always confused by Maybelle's status within the family, since she has been variously described as "cousin Maybelle" and "sister-in-law Maybelle." She was both; she was Sara's cousin, and after Sara married A.P., Maybelle met and married A.P.'s brother Ezra.)

When Sara finally splits for good in 1949, Maybelle goes on the road with her daughters Helen, Anita and June, which constitutes the second half of the bio. And it's boring, despite the fact that they give Chet Atkins his first real job, befriend Hank Williams (who puts the moves on Anita), and go on tour with Elvis in 1955. But everything was more fun when Kingsport was the big city, and an all-day drive from home. Go figure.

There'll Always Be an England

On Casey Kasem's American Top Forty this past weekend, from 1975, he mentioned that there were only six foreign-born women who'd had Number One hits as solo artists - and only one of those was from England. My first thought was that that wasn't very many, but now I think maybe that sounds about right. For one thing, 1975 was a long time ago - Celine Dion was seven years old at the time. And there weren't that many foreign acts period on the charts before the Beatles.

But that figure of only one English woman with a chart-topper seemed a little hinky. And I have to say Casey cheated a little to get there; Lulu, for example, who hit Number One with "To Sir With Love" in 1967, was British, but she was from Scotland, not England. (She turned 19 while the song was in the midst of its five-week stay at the top of the charts, by the way.) Then there was Olivia Newton-John, who was actually born in Cambridge, England. Her father was from Wales and her mother was from Germany, and the family moved to Australia when Olivia was five, which was enough for her to escape Casey's parameters.

So who was the one purely English woman who'd had a Number One by that time? 'Twas the lovely Petula Clark, born and raised in Epsom, Surrey, England. Unlike Lulu, Pet was a vet of the business by the time she became an American star: She was 32 by the time "Downtown" hit the top in January 1965.

Birthday Wishes to the Fat Man

Fats Domino turns 81 today. Mardi Gras was just this past Tuesday, you know. Do you think Fats' birthday has ever fallen on Fat Tuesday itself? That would be oh so appropriate, but I haven't the wherewithal to figure out if it's ever happened.

We'd All Love to See the Plan

In the comments regarding yesterday's item, Joe described "Revolution" as sort of a pastiche of the Beatles' early influences, noting, "The slow version is Chess records on the nod with doo-wop backing vocals." Joe is probably aware of this, but those doo-wop vocals were originally on the fast version as well.

You can tell this because at some point between when the single version of "Revolution" was cut, on July 12, 1968, and when it was released, on August 28, 1968, the Beatles made a video for the song. On it, you can clearly see Paul and George, although miming to a backing track, stepping forward to the microphone and mouthing the words "ah-om, shoo-be-doo-wop," although no sound comes out. Obviously, they put the backing vocals on the original record and made the video expecting them to still be there, then someone wiped them off before the single was released.

You can see that video here, if you so choose. The original video, with the backing vocals restored, surfaced on the Beatles Anthology DVD, and it sounded great. The shoo-be-doo-wops made even more explicit the connection between the Beatles' roots in Fifties rock & roll and the late-Sixties sensibility of the lyrics and the screaming guitar. Kind of like how Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" connected the Motown sound with the moral issues of the Aughts.

(Incidentally, I meant to mention this earlier, but the first disc of the Blue Album, which traces from "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" through Sgt. Pepper and up to "Hey Jude"/"Revolution," would be by far the greatest album ever made if it had been issued by its lonesome. The only real weak track on there is "Magical Mystery Tour," and most of the songs on there are stone classics, including five of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs, and that doesn't even include "Revolution." Which brings up the question: How is "Revolution" not one of the 500 Greatest Songs? [Even more incidentally, the line "When you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow" carries special resonance for anyone who has visited the offices of Rolling Stone.])

Anyway, let's have a listen:

A Healthy Rivalry

Not having been alive at the time, I always kind of pieced together the British Invasion as consisting primarily of the Beatles breaking through at the beginning of 1964, followed by the Rolling Stones coming on with "Satisfaction" a year or so later. "Satisfaction," with its crude riff and roughly vernacular lyrics, doesn't really sound anything like the Beatles' early hits, but one thing I never had a sense for was - how long after the Ed Sullivan business did the Stones reach the charts? Was there a point when the Stones replaced the Beatles as America's newest hitmakers?

I thought it would be interesting to put together a list of all the Beatles and Stones Top Ten American hits, through the end of 1970, overlaid so that you can see who was dominating and who was answering whom. And to see if anything else interesting came up.

There was this: Only one time did the Top Forty feature new entries by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, on March 5, 1966, when "Nowhere Man" and "19th Nervous Breakdown" both crashed the charts. Here's the rest of them, with the dates when they first entered the Top Forty:

"I Want to Hold Your Hand," January 25, 1964
"She Loves You," February 1, 1964
"Please Please Me," February 22, 1964
"Twist and Shout," March 21, 1964
"Can't Buy Me Love," March 28, 1964
"Do You Want to Know a Secret," April 11, 1964
"Love Me Do," May 2, 1964
"P.S. I Love You," May 16, 1964
"A Hard Day's Night," July 18, 1964
"Time Is on My Side," November 7, 1964
"I Feel Fine," December 5, 1964
"She's a Woman," December 12, 1964
"Eight Days a Week," February 27, 1965
"The Last Time," April 10, 1965
"Ticket to Ride," May 1, 1965
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," June 19, 1965
"Help!," August 14, 1965
"Yesterday," October 2, 1965
"Get Off My Cloud," October 16, 1965
"We Can Work It Out," December 18, 1965
"Day Tripper," December 25, 1965
"As Tears Go By," January 8, 1966
"Nowhere Man," March 5, 1966
"19th Nervous Breakdown," March 5, 1966
"Paint It, Black," May 21, 1966
"Paperback Writer," June 11, 1966
"Mother's Little Helper," July 16, 1966
"Yellow Submarine," August 27, 1966
"Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?," October 8, 1966
"Ruby Tuesday," February 4, 1967
"Penny Lane," March 4, 1967
"Strawberry Fields Forever," March 11, 1967
"All You Need Is Love," July 29, 1967
"Hello Goodbye," December 9, 1967
"Lady Madonna," March 23, 1968
"Jumpin' Jack Flash," June 15, 1968
"Hey Jude," September 14, 1968
"Get Back," May 10, 1969
"The Ballad of John and Yoko," June 21, 1969
"Honky Tonk Women," July 26, 1969
"Come Together," October 18, 1969
"Something," October 18, 1969
"Let It Be," March 21, 1970
"The Long and Winding Road," May 23, 1970

Ho Ho Ho

Who sings a better whoa-ho-ho: Beyonce, in "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," or Alicia Keys, in "No One"? I think I'll have to go with Beyonce, although I still think "No One" is a better song. "Single Ladies" is awfully good, and those whoa-ho-hos are the best part. She sounds like she's keeping a shuttlecock aloft with a badminton racket.

Home and Dry

You may remember a few months ago I told the story of Gerry "Baker Street" Rafferty, who walked out of a London rehab hospital last August 1st, and at that time I wrote that (on November 20th), no one knew where Rafferty was.

Well, they do now. Earlier this week, the Evening Times, which I gather is published in London, reported that Rafferty was found healthy and happy in his home in Tuscany, where he's been for the past six months. "At his house there, which is just north of Florence, he continues to compose and record new songs and music," read the statement from his attorney. "He would like to send a personal thank-you to all of his fans who have expressed their concern for his well-being and he hopes to release a new album of his most recent work in the summer." I bet that album will be a huge hit.

One wonders why it took this long for anyone to look for Rafferty at his house. I suppose it's possible that no one cared to find him, but that is just too awful a scenario to subscribe to.

Season Four

Throughout the fourth season of NBC's Saturday Night Live, there was a running gag that John Belushi, whose film Animal House had opened to great acclaim in the summer of 1978, had forged a future as a great movie star and was one of the biggest shots in all of entertainment. (By the way, Dan Aykroyd was supposed to play D-Day, which makes all kinds of sense.) That was the theme of the monologue of the season's first show, when Mayor Koch presented Belushi with a certificate of achievement ("Isn't there a key to the city or something? Dolly Parton got a key to the city"), and it was kept up through Gary Busey's show, on which Jane Curtin claimed that Busey had stolen Belushi's Oscar nomination. Belushi even missed a show, when Richard Benjamin hosted.

This is not a state of affairs that is conducive to ensemble comedy. The talent that was there, and the ambition, was still enough to make Season Four a landmark TV show. On the show hosted by Cicely Tyson, Belushi says offhandedly that he's on the best show on television, and he's not bragging; it's a simple statement of fact.

But having watched every episode of the fourth season now, and the precedeing two seasons not so long ago, I am prepared to officially declare that the third season of Saturday Night Live was the show's peak, the finest of the series' run, and therefore probably the finest season of televised comedy in American history.

I had expected that Season Four would be when the recurring characters took over, but that's not really the case. I'm not going to go back and count, but I think there were more Coneheads in Season Three. There were plenty of nerds and Roseanne Roseannadanna, and three installments of the now-forgotten Widettes, but the only thing that got sickeningly repetitive was the weekly dose of Mr. Bill, which I soon began treating like a commercial.

Most of the wounds were self-inflicted. For one thing, sketches got longer, as if the writers were running short of ideas and needed to pad out the ideas they had to fill the show. On Michael Palin's show from May 12, 1979, following the cold opening, there were a grand total of four sketches. One of them, a chapter in the history of Miles Cowperthwaite called "I Am Nailed to the Hull," took us aboard The Raging Queen for a funny but interminable fifteen minutes. (That whole show was out of whack; Palin ended his opening monologue by throwing it directly to musical guest James Taylor, which I have never seen before or since.) The infamous Milton Berle show, which Lorne Michaels forbade to ever be re-aired, didn't suffer so much from Berle's supposed mugging and overplaying in the sketches (which wasn't that bad, and Berle was fine as an aforementioned Widette) as it did from a very long, unfunny Borscht Belt style monologue and a sappy, mawkish closing monologue kicked off with a rendition of Kurt Weill's "September Song" and finished off by the notorious planted standing ovation. If the show failed, it was the fault of whoever gave Berle all that time alone onstage.

But there was a lot of great stuff, too. The Pepsi Syndrome, from Richard Benjamin's show, was long but earned every second of screen time, giving each player (except the mysteriously missing John Belushi) a chance to shine, even Franken and Davis as the speaking mimes who made up the Two Mile Island Players. Garrett Morris put a wicked, sassy spin on his brief turn as a maid; near the end of the sketch, Gilda came out and did 20 seconds' worth of Baba Wawa and just killed. They even brought out Rodney Dangerfield to explain just how big the nuclear accident had made the president. I once saw an ice-skaing exhibition of former Olympic champs, except that rather than compulsories and highly regulated routines, they just came out and kicked butt on the ice for 90 seconds apiece, doing whatever killer routines they could come up with. This sketch reminded me of that.

We also got the apotheosis of Nick the Lounge Singer, on Maureen Stapleton's show. After singing "Beast of Burden" to Pearl Bailey, Nick Wings came across three women on their way to a National Women's Caucus, leading to the following exchange:

Murray: What do you know, fifteen hundred women all in one place, maybe even Nick Wings could score. What do you think about that?

Gilda (after a perfectly timed beat): I wouldn't bet on it.

Then he serenaded them with "Thank Heaven for Little Girls."

The next week, Buck Henry hosted, as he traditionally did for the season-ending show. Near the end of the show, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd appeared in a Greek diner sketch, one that showed the Olympia closed on account of a fire. It would be their final sketch. When Buck came out for the goodbyes, he couldn't even acknowledge the end of the season, because Michael O'Donoghue was busy screeching out his done-to-death steel-needles-in-the-eyeballs shtick. Buck just waved goodbye, and the finest comedy series in the history of American television had, for all intents and purposes, come to an end.

Back in the New York Groove

From the Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything Dept.: Did you know that three of the songs on Kiss' dreadful 1981 album Music From "The Elder" were co-written by Lou Reed? According to Kiss legend, Reed contributed the line "A world without heroes is like a world without sun" to the song "World Without Heroes," which was the album's first (and only) single. But the album credits claim that Reed co-wrote "Mister Blackwell" and "Dark Light" as well.

That's not the most bizarre songwriting collaboration out there, though. Not until someone shoots down the story that Bob Dylan co-wrote "Steel Bars" with Michael Bolton. I can't verify the provenance of this, but this quote supposedly comes straight from Bolton:

"We're planning on writing some more songs together. He's kind of hungry to get back out there and wants to work with a few contemporary hit song writers. Someone who works with Dylan called me up and said 'Bob Dylan would like to write with you.' I was awed. I told him, 'I don't even know how I could write a lyric when working with you ... I'm too intimidated.' But then we started messing around with some chords and wrote 'Steel Bars,' a song about obsession. It took us two sessions to write, and when I left, I was told, 'Bob likes you and he wants you to come back.'"

Congratulations

All of us at OPC offer our congratulations to frequent commenter/fellow blogger/all-around good guy Gavin Edwards on the birth of his son Dashiell yesterday. Dashiell joins older brother Strummer in the ever-expanding Edwards clan. One nice thing about having a simple last name like Edwards is it gives you license to be a bit more creative on the given names; me, not so much.