Category: Music

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Sit Down, Young Stranger

[updated May 2008]

Gordon Lightfoot made the top 50 essential Canadian singles for a mediocre song about a stereotypical slut who hung around his back stairs. If he had to be on the list– and I don’t quibble with that– it should have been for “Early Morning Rain”, “That’s What you get for Lovin’ me” or something else.

How about “Sit Down, Young Stranger”?

For all the songs written about the generation gap in the 1960’s, “Sit Down, Young Stranger” is one of the most touching, and the most diligent. It’s not a lazy lyric (like “Sundown”)– there’s some thought in a phrase like “my love was given freely and oft-times was returned” (even if the “oft-times” is hackneyed). Not “oft-times”, but “often”.

The son’s encounter with his parents parallels his encounter with an imperfect world, in which he is lonely, at times, but satisfied within his dreams.

It’s the weirdness of the song that I like. Lightfoot seems to be struggling to express a real experience and real insight instead of a cliché about rebellion. There is real pain in the distance between father and son. The son’s ideals are somewhat inchoate and fanciful, and his father is harsh but not mean. “How can you find your fortune if you cannot find yourself?” It sounds more real than Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” which sounds schematic and contrived in comparison. There is some sympathy for the father, and understanding, and some distance from the mother’s unconditional and perhaps smothering love. The song is full of little edges that scrape like sandpaper: “not knowing where to sit”, “my father looms above me/for him there is no rest”, “my thoughts are all in spin”, “I never questioned no one and no one questioned me”.

The last verse is a mystery to me. Logically, it is the son responding the father of the previous verse: “I wait for your reply”.

The answer is not easy
For souls are not reborn
To wear the crown of peace
You must wear the crown of thorns
If Jesus had a reason,
I’m sure he would not tell
They treated him so badly,
how could he wish them well?

But it almost sounds like the father speaking at first– it is the wisdom (or foolishness) of age that only violence (thorns) can lead to peace. But then I think it is the son, observing that the mystery of Christ is that he didn’t have a reason for his actions– I presume his self-destruction– in the human sense. And the son doesn’t see the divine in Christ’s rejection of his own family– just silence (“souls are not reborn”). But it’s hard to tell if this is a rejection of Christ or acceptance.

[added November 2009] I missed the possibility that it is a narrator who speaks those lines. It makes some sense– it is an observation that might be made by a third party: to wear the crown of peace… Is it a narrative voice telling us that this thorny distance between father and son, between the generations, can only be traversed in blood?

Those last eight lines are among the most poetic every inscribed by a Canadian song-writer– and among the most haunting.

It’s a puzzling verse.

There is no doubt about the meaning of the poignant last phrase, though. All the searching and questioning comes down to one thing, that shattering, heart-breaking last line:

The answer’s in the forest,
Carved upon a tree.
John loves Mary,
Does anyone love me?

Added Nov 2008: after re-reading this, I am struck again by what a remarkable song it is. I heard it first as a teenager living at home in the late 1960’s, and what I most vividly remember was the unexpected last line, the sneakiness of it– what does it all come down to, after all? What is it that really matters? What is the distance between my parents and myself? Does anyone love me?

I mentioned that Christ rejected his family. For all the “family values” preached by the religious right, would it really surprise you to find that the Bible doesn’t really support something called “family values”? It doesn’t. When Christ’s family approaches him during his ministry, demanding some kind of acknowledgement of family obligation, Christ declared that his followers, his disciples are his real “family”. He warns that his message will tear families apart. He clearly places a priority on the kingdom against the requirements of kinship. He even says that a person who is not willing to reject his family to follow him is not worthy of the kingdom.

In fact, the last verse of “Sit Down Young Stranger” gives you a better sense of Christ’s view of the family than all of the ranting and raving you will ever hear from James Dobson.

But then, fake religion never embraces heartbreak.

Gordon Lightfoot’s and Other Get Lost Songs

 

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The Roches Sing the Hallelujah Chorus

You only get one first kiss in life.

And I’ll bet that for many people, that first kiss sucked. Maybe you missed the lips, or slobbered, or quit too soon or too late, or, more likely, it wasn’t really the person you wanted to kiss so badly, but your second or third choice. Maybe you didn’t even want to be kissed.

But when the first kiss is with someone you really like, and your lips connect, and her lips are incredibly soft and slightly cool, and your arms feel just right around her waist, and she kindly puts her arms around your neck….

And you can’t experience the magical moment of exquisite tickled transcendence of hearing the Roche Sisters perform the Hallelujah Chorus for the first time again and again and again.

Sure, it’s great to see it again. I want to see it again. I enjoy seeing it again. But I remember the moment I saw them, on PBS in 1983, for the first time, and fell in love with what they were doing. They took a famous piece of music– which had been flogged to death already by then– and reinvented it. They turned it inside out and upside down and toyed with it, and that’s what I think really electrifies the listener the first time– the playfulness of the whole idea. The shocking delight of making something look funny and brilliant and powerful and poignant at the same time.

All right– you want to see it, don’t you? This is a pretty coarse, bad copy, but it will have to do for now:

Why I do not stand for the Hallelujah Chorus: You have to stand. You WILL stand. You are hereby ordered to stand because that is what everybody does and they’ve always done it and it shows that we are people of good taste and that we respect good music and do not dare to defy the authorities who have ordained that the Hallelujah Chorus is better than anything by Bach.

Well, tough. I hereby declare that from now on, I only stand in reverence for Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #5 or Cantata 42, Dylan’s “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and Cat Power’s version of “Satisfaction”.

Another Great Song by The Roches.

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The Geisha

Critic Robert Christgau, reporting a comment from a woman friend on Olivia Newton-John: “A geisha,” she scoffed. “She makes her voice smaller than it really is just to please men.”

Sometimes pop culture amazes me. Why would anyone make a film of “Dukes of Hazzard”? Or a shot-by-shot remake of “Psycho”? And why, in the name of infinity, would any sane person prefer to listen to Anne Murray’s version of “I Fall to Pieces” over Patsy Cline’s, when Patsy Cline’s version is readily available? Have people lost their minds? What exactly does anybody get out of “For the Good Times”, when rendered by Murray’s flat, implacably bland voice. For God’s sake, people, haven’t you ever heard of Emmy Lou Harris or Lucinda Williams?

Anne Murray, by the way, was a full-time physical education teacher before “Snowbird” rocketed her to fame, as they say. In a CBC special back in the early 70’s, I remember a segment in which she led her band in some calisthenics. She was wearing a short tennis-style skirt. At one point, with the camera behind her, she glanced over her shoulder and flipped up the back of her skirt and gave the viewer a mischievous little wiggle of her ass.

She has not done the musical equivalent in 30 years. Anne Murray, that sweet, vivacious, authentic, Nova Scotia girl, has become a musical product, tasteful and poised, and bland..

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The Geriatric Cover Song

Great and Not so Great Covers

There’s something interesting in Nouvelle Vague’s version of the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton”, and it isn’t the novelty effect. There’s an insouciant poignancy in the song, that isn’t there in the Clash’s version, a shimmering, simmering insinuating sneer. The Clash was an arrogant thug. Nouvelle Vague is a precocious child, asking the beaten and bruised: “how yah gonna come”? Come on now. Are you as tough as you think you are? It’s superb.

The same goes for Cat Powers remake of the Stones’ “Satisfaction”. She has absorbed the song, chewed it over, fanged it a couple of times, and emerged with an utterly twisted, vicious, revision. It’s brilliant.

I say that because the idea of doing over a great song isn’t necessarily a bad one. But it is when Paul Anka does “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Rod Stewart does “It Had to be You” and now Carly Simon releases an album of torch ballads– I want to get out the torch.

There’s probably a lesser-known antecedent but I seem to recall that this awful trend started around 1979, when Linda Ronstadt’s career took a dive and she tried to reposition herself as a chanteuse with an album of pop “standards” by various allegedly great songwriters. Ronstadt, previously known for her country ballads and power-pop tunes, (“Different Drum”, “Long, Long Time”) was praised for her brave excursion into the mainstream, even though her performances of these songs were not particularly distinguished. To go with her new-found sense of sophistication, she lost weight and posed for some cheese-cake photos for Annie Liebowitz for Rolling Stone Magazine.

The critics are expected to fall over themselves to be the first to proclaim that they have such good taste that they could enjoy something that did not feature an screaming electric guitar or a hook.

And actually, I do believe that some of these, at least, are “great” songs, in the same way that some girls are “great” girls. They look so beautiful and refined and tasteful and sweet, you just want to buy them a diamond. Just don’t expect oral sex in return.

What you do not want to see in a great song is Rod Stewart’s lips behind it.

As for those reviewers– what are they going to do? It occurred to me that they are extremely unlikely to do otherwise than lavish praise on these wholesome tributes to the old fart school of music composition. Firstly, they would be absolutely stricken if anyone were to accuse them of having tunnel vision– don’t you know that “Summertime” is one of the greatest songs ever written? Secondly, I don’t think most of these critics, with the exception of the Times’ Stephen Holden, have a clue about what they are reviewing. The uniform adulation of mediocre vocalists like Norah Jones and Diana Krall tells you that a certain amount of posturing is going on. These women look great and they have astute management and they can mostly hold pitch. That’s about it.

If you’re really convinced that Diana Krall is a great singer, please name me a song or two performed by Emmy Lou Harris, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, or Lucinda Williams that would reflect kindly on Ms. Krall’s talents in comparison.

Unlike the Nouvelle Vague’s version of “Guns of Brixton”, or Die Toten Hosen’s version of “Hang on Sloopy”, or Cat Powers’ searing “Satisfaction”, none of these artists actually bring a whole lot of originality or creativity to their remakes. If anything, as Holden observes, most of these updates are dumbed down, the orchestrations more like movie sound tracks than settings, the phrasing pedestrian and utterly predictable. Worse than that– the posturing. All the irreverence and inventiveness and wit and fun of rock’n’roll is gone. I am now an artist, as in, the artist will appear at 10:00, in an evening gown or tuxedo, and he or she will be serious. She is going to sell the song. He is going to hold notes longer than he does when singing “Maggie Mae”. The audience will grovel at 10:06:15, then return to their martinis.

What they have forgotten is that there is a reason that the Beatles were like a breath of fresh air in 1963, and why Bob Dylan mattered.

You want covers? I’ll give you GREAT covers:

Satisfaction (Cat Power)
I Fought the Law (The Clash)
My Back Pages (Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, etc.)
Positively Fourth Street (Lucinda Williams)
Hang on Sloopy (the Toten Hosen)
Downtown (The Killer Barbies)
Tower of Song (Nick Cave)
He Hit Me (and it felt like a kiss) (Hole)
Oh Lonesome Me (Neil Young)
Wayfarin’ Stranger (Emmy-Lou Harris, with an exquisite lead acoustic guitar from Albert Lee)
Jolene (White Stripes)
You Aint Goin’ Nowhere (the Byrds)

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Leonard Cohen Farts at the WTC

Leonard Cohen is over 70 and he’s been living in Los Angeles for too long.

As soon as I realized that he had a song about 9/11 on his new album (Dear Heather), I knew what it would be about, and I knew what it would sound like. That is depressing.

I knew it would express this coy expectation that the old radical left would somehow approve of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, or think America deserved them in some way, and that Cohen himself was just too smart to be taken in by that. At the same time, he would modulate the stridency of the right– so he couldn’t be accused of being too conventional or, heaven forbid, reactionary. He would feign disinterest, and neutrality, coyly, to try to imbue what is fundamentally an utterly conventional response to the event with some kind of mystique:

Some people say
They hate us of old
Our women unveiled
Our slaves and our gold
I wouldn’t know
I’m just holding the fort

I’m just holding the fort, as if I am above partisan politics and hold only reasonable views on the matter. Or worse– what is “reasonable” is what I am now about. I have forgotten what is so unreasonable about the reasonable.

“I wouldn’t know”, as if, unlike everyone else, his judgment is grounded in thoughtful reflection, not knee-jerk platitudes.   This, from a man who doesn’t seem to be aware of the history of American involvement in the Middle East, the interventions, the coups sponsored by the CIA, the extraction of oil, the tolerance of authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, before 1979, Iran.

So he thinks, why on earth are they mad at us?  We haven’t done anything.

And then he stops short of giving an actual opinion. He wants you to project your own feelings about the subject onto his ambiguous lines:

Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day

But if you knew it was coming, the mystique is gone. It’s gone. Cohen is too smart to wrap himself in the flag, but he’s got a pin on his lapel. He is too smart to resort to slogans, but comes down safely on the side of those educated but insular suburban minds of middle America like the editorial board of the New York Times or the reporters at “60 Minutes”.

I’m really quite progressive on many issues, but, after all, America really does have enemies.  Am I still hip?

Added March 2005:

I don’t mind that he plays his politics close to the vest. What I mind is that it is a weak song. “Some people say” takes you nowhere. What people? Who?  Why do they say that? And, Leonard, do you think people should go crazy, or should they report for duty? You don’t seem to care. If you don’t care, you have nothing to say. If you have nothing to say, don’t say waste the space on your album.

Neither option, of course, provides you with the option of yawning. Neither does Cohen seem even dimly aware of the fact that America is not the center of the universe, and just because 9/11 was tragedy does not mean that yawning is not an option.

He did far better on “There is a War” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1976):

There is a war between the left and right
A war between the black and white
A war between the odd and the even…
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
That’s right, get in it.
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
It’s just beginning.

That was a provocative song. You might or might not agree with him, but at least he came at with creative energy and inspiration.

Or how about “The Future”:

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture

You see, it’s not his politics that have gone soft.  It’s his aesthetic.  “The Future” implies as conservative an outlook as “I’d Love to Change the World“, with, perhaps more subtlety.

By the way, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Cohen’s talent does not translate into film: the “official video” is terrible.   Cohen obviously had no clue of what to do in front of a camera.  I just watched it.  My God– they bleeped out “crack” and “anal sex”.  What kind of fucking regime is managing Cohen’s videos now?  (Cohen himself changed “anal sex” to “careless sex” in live performances:     Here’s the live version with the self-bastardization.)

That is unspeakably disappointing: the grocer of despair has become the checkout cashier of minor annoyance.  The background singers, by the way, in this live version don’t cut it: where’s Julie Christensen?

[2011-03] I don’t think I gave enough credit to those lyrics from “There is a War”. Is the natural state of humanity war? War with each other, because every soul seeks to possess reality, to extend the ego to every conquerable continent, emotional or otherwise? Yeah… “I wouldn’t know”.

I’m not sure where Cohen comes down on The Patriot Act, but I know lame lyrics when I hear them: “some people say” and that very tired and boring “I’m just holding the fort”. Rolling Stone Magazine seems to think he’s attained a kind of zen-like simplicity that is deeply profound. I think that if anybody else had written those lyrics, Rolling Stone would not be bending over backwards to explain why those lyrics are not merely sophomoric.

Leonard, it’s time to retire. No, wait– I can see that you already have.

An interesting cover of “There is a War”.

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This Song is Your Song

There is a little cartoon on www.jibjab.com that makes fun of both John Kerry and George Bush. It’s pretty funny, really, with it’s pythonesque images, and clever lyrics.

There is a poignant image of an native American standing in front of a beautiful western sunset saying “this land was my land” as the space behind him fills with Burger Kings and Walmarts. Yes, it’s a cliché. But sometimes, something becomes a cliché because it’s true. Because the scandal of relentlessly ugly and tacky American streets and malls has never gone away.

The tune is “This Land” by Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie, it turns out, didn’t record it until after 1956. A Canadian group, the Travelers, recorded their own version with Canadian lyrics in 1955 and had a huge hit with it. They were invited to write Canadian lyrics for it by Pete Seeger who was in Toronto at the time, because the song had become black-listed in the U.S.

There is a missing line or two.

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing —
God blessed America for me.

Maybe you never heard those lines before. It’s possible because those lines are usually omitted especially when we teach this charming little song to school children. Guthrie himself sung variations of the “God blessed America for me.” Apparently Guthrie wrote the wrong as a response to “God Bless America” which he hated. Here’s another verse you don’t hear very often:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people —
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.

Absurdly, the owners of the copyright are suing www.jibjab.com for using their song in this little cartoon. My jaw dropped when I heard this. For one thing, Woody Guthrie believe in folk music, and there’s something unnatural about a copyright on a folk song.

Woody Guthrie on Copyright (1933):

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

For another thing, I think Guthrie would have approved of the jibjab parody. If there was one thing he liked to ridicule, it was a dishonest politician.

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Packaging the Next Big Thing

He soon looked at which band under contract he could develop into a hit-maker the fastest. Judging Coldplay the best bet, he pushed its 2001 debut, “Parachutes,” which eventually sold two million copies. NY Times, March 22, 2004

It’s been a long time since I believed that artists become known because they are talented and interesting. As a child, I thought the process was something like osmosis. The musician writes songs and performs and the talent scout hears the musician play and decides that he or she is singularly remarkable and signs him or her to a contract and then he or she records an album and it is sent to the critics and the radio stations and the best stuff gets promoted and heard on the radio.

No, no, no. It’s Mr. Slater, and people like him. They decide which artist is worthy of development. The artist is “developed” and packaged, and marketed. You hear this artist eventually because Mr. Slater decided you would. Maybe you read about the artist in Rolling Stone or Spin and saw him or her perform on Letterman or Leno or Conan O’Brien.

And then you understand why an artist might become bitter when an album they produced fails. You think, it must have been a bad album. They say, no, it’s because the record company didn’t promote it. You think, surely the record company would have promoted it if it had been any good. Not so. Sometimes they simply decide that even with heavy promotion, a particular album will only sell 500,000 copies. Hardly worth their while, when they might be putting their efforts towards an album that could sell 1 or 2 million copies.

So even artists that produce albums carefully and under budget and consistently make a profit might nevertheless be dropped by their label. That’s tough. That is my understanding of what happened to T-Bone Burnett before he got heavily into the production side of the business.

On the other hand, the label might invest heavily in an artist like Liz Phair, remake her image and promote her all over the place, and still run into a wall of resistance. It’s power is not absolute.

It’s hard to judge at times when the public acclaims somebody and when they are simply manipulated into buying a sham. It’s not nice to think that you bought that Sarah McLachlan album because a pimp like Andrew Slater decided exactly how to manipulate you, but it possible that that is exactly what happened, except that the pimp’s name was actually Terry McBride.

It’s not that her material is not any good.  It is.  But there are many talented artists who you will never hear because they aren’t as physically attractive as McLachlan, or they don’t play ball with the music industry.

This is a stunning fact that you should pay attention to:  there are 4 million tracks on Spotify [updated 2022-05] that nobody has ever streamed.

Spotify claims that 80% of the tracks have been streamed at least once.  Think about that claim:

  • Does Spotify need you to believe that a high percentage of the tracks have been streamed at least once?  Yes, they do.
  • How many of these are streamed to completion?
  • What percentage of tracks by “unknown” artists are streamed?

So, while no album, no matter how good, can be a “huge success” (as defined by numbers of units sold) without massive, coordinated promotion, nor can an album become a “huge success” unless it has some kind appeal to begin with– like Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy”. Was it really all that great? Maybe not. But it was good, and appealing, and McLachlan could be photographed to look sexy, so there it was: a hit.

It is not all that unusual nowadays for an artist to be packaged as “alternative”– someone who can’t be packaged and manipulated. Isn’t that exactly how Avril Levigne is packaged?

Added November 2009:

Nellie McKay pissed off her record label and they dropped her (or she dropped them). She immediately sort of vanished off the radar screens. What is she doing now? I don’t know. I thought she was very promising, but maybe it just didn’t pan out. A lot of young artists have one promising album in them… and then they run out of compelling material.

Another possibility: they just didn’t want to conform to the process of packaging and slicing and dicing their own material to suit the suits.

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Grace Slick and the Phantom Microphone

In the mid-1960’s, television realized that it had to acknowledge that there was something going on out there in reality-land that did not conform to the standard paradigm of the way big people do things in America– because there was money in it (which was exactly the way big people did things anyway) and so they deigned to acknowledge rock’n’roll and decided to occasionally allow a rock’n’roll band onto the Ed Sullivan Show or Hootenanny or Hullabaloo.

But what do you do with them? How do you pose them? What do you put in the background? How much do we have to pay them?

They discovered that if you played the recording while the band faked a performance of the song, you didn’t have to pay very much for the performance. It was technically promotion, not a performance. Union rules didn’t apply. So Dick Clark, who I really believe is the king pimp of all television pimps, week after week, on American Bandstand, featured musicians standing in front of real teens from America lip-synching to their own tunes. Did they think we were fooled? I don’t know. I’m not too sure.

Did they think we were stupid?  Without a doubt.

On Ed Sullivan, the bands usually (but not always) really played. You can see cords going from their guitars to their amps– a dead give-away in that era. If there are no cords– it’s lip-synching. Thank you Ed. And it is now time for you to stop introducing Jimmy Morrison and the Doors, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, and Mick Jagger and the Stones, as “something for the youngsters of America”. Weird, wasn’t it? Dean Martin would come out and put all the adults to sleep with songs about pillows that you dream on, and then Mick Jagger would come out for the “youngsters” and tell them he couldn’t get no satisfaction.

The other way you could tell if it was really live was if you heard a mistake. And that’s what gives Grace Slick away in this performance of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. It’s real. It’s live. Grace misses the beat on “pill” and has to speed up to catch the beat on “one pill makes you small”. That is her smiling, I’m pretty sure, because she just made a mistake in front of 25 million people. She’s cute, isn’t she? It’s endearing. One minute, she is a poised artist, delivering the amazing goods, the number one hit single in America. Then, just for a second, she’s an embarrassed little girl again who turned the wrong way on the dance floor.

There are a lot of great songs from the sixties, and a lot of great performances. There are only a few performances of great songs. And there are even fewer performances that are so monumental that they seem to leap from their era and genre into a kind of stratosphere of transcendental moments in life. There was Hendrix performing “All Along the Watchtower”, and Dylan doing “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in London, and the Beatles doing “Hey Jude”. There was Jimmy Morrison doing “Light My Fire”.

And there was Grace Slick performing “White Rabbit”. You have to hear Grace Slick’s voice to believe it. It is incredibly big and powerful and you might believe it could be heard above the electric guitars and drums even without amplification. The only other female singers I can think of with a voice of comparable size are Mama Cass Elliot and Janis Joplin. Grace was sexier than those two and the next top twenty female singers combined.

Grace Slick’s voice probably couldn’t have been small if she’d wanted it too. The first lines of “White Rabbit” are delivered with as much restraint as you could possibly muster for a Sherman tank of a voice. Then she builds, with an insinuating vibrato, like a whip being drawn back. She builds and builds until, by the last lines– “remember what the dormouse said…”– her voice is in full bore, a wall of sound coming at you like a freight train, tidal and relentless, slashing guitars just barely able to provide seething rhythmic foundation to this thing of power and explosive fury.

While Grace Slick was singing like this, the Grammys for best female vocal performance went to Barbara Streisand, Eydie Gorme, Bobbie Gentry, Peggy Lee, and Dionne Warwick. That’s why I haven’t paid any attention to the Grammys for about 40 years.

Grace Slick had beautiful blue eyes and long black hair. She was uncompromising— she quit Jefferson Starship when they went commercial. She drank too much. She got married and divorced, married and divorced. She had one daughter, China, who would be about 30 by now.

“White Rabbit” was written by Grace Slick, inspired by the Lewis Carroll book.

Alice discovers that one pill makes her larger and one pill makes her small. But the pills that mother gives her don’t do anything at all. That about sums up the 1960’s.

White Rabbit was used in a movie called “Go Ask Alice” which purported to show you the true experiences of a bad girl who did some drugs and thereby ended up as a teenage prostitute in Los Angeles and eventually died of an overdose.

If I recall correctly, it wasn’t a terrible movie. But we knew that mother made this film.

Grace Slick – Live

grace01.jpg (30294 bytes)

Grace just missed the beat.  Looking at yah with those very intense eyes.

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Grace suddenly looks down.  You wonder why.  She was staring, fetchingly, right at the camera– right at you.  Then she looks away, as if she suddenly saw something important

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Mystery solved– it’s a second camera.  She was coached to look at the camera but someone missed a cue and didn’t switch for about five or six seconds.  Dig the psychedelic background?   Higher consciousness, baby..

grace_plug5.jpg (20719 bytes)

Grace sings to an electrical outlet.  I’m not kidding.  This is from a performance in which the band lip-synched to “Somebody to Love”– there are no cords on the guitars.  So Grace decided to sing to an electrical cord instead of a microphone, and, yes, she’s laughing and making fun of the whole thing.

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From the same performance.  The tambourine player, back row, far left, is holding a cigarette in his left hand.  Notice there are no cords on the guitars.

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One more from “White Rabbit”.  Costuming by Cecil B. De Mille.

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Pepsi Poseurs

You can’t get much phonier than this.

Pepsi collects about 15 teenagers who were targeted for lawsuits by the vicious RIAA, for downloading copyrighted music from the Internet. Pepsi put them into an ad with a few labels– “incriminated”, “busted”– over– get this– Green Day’s swipe of the Clash’s cover of “I Fought the Law”. Then one of the girls says that she is still downloading…. at iTunes! She didn’t say “but now I pay for it”. She says “legally”.

Did Green Day think most people have never heard of the Clash? Sounds like they copped the basic arrangement from them.

I Fought the Law? The gist of Pepsi’s smarmy little ad is that you should give your money to Apple and buy Pepsi and listen to your mommy and daddy– except they are probably downloading music too– and respect authority. It’s cool to be a serf.

But even this ad is not as smarmy as the one featuring a kid who is supposed to be a young Jimi Hendrix, trying to choose between a Pepsi and Coke.

I presume that permission was granted by some Twisted Trustees of the Estate of Jimi Hendrix. As I have said before in these pages, it should be illegal for anyone, trustee or not, to be able to sell the image, name, or likeness of someone who is dead. It should be covered by the laws about “rendering an indignity to a dead body”. If someone is long dead, it should be public domain anyway. For someone like Hendrix, it’s too contemptible for words. It is a terrible, terrible dishonor to his memory to suggest that he would sell out like this, that he would so allow his name and image to be tarnished, cheapened, and insulted like this.

This is far, far more disgraceful than anything Janet Jackson did at the Super Bowl. The FCC should look into it. Michael Powell should call his dad and ask him how big of a fine would be enough to compensate the general public for the indecency rendered to the body of Jimi Hendrix.

Next, we go after IBM for what they did to the Little Tramp.

Here’s the biggest irony: the MPAA and Recording Industry always claim that they are protecting their “original” creative works whenever they try to shut down a piracy site. Then they use an absolutely ripped off version of “I Fought the Law” to flog the idea.

Listen to the version by the Clash and then Green Day. Do we need to protect artists who rip off other artists so blatantly? [Added 2012-01-18]

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The 10 Biggest Scandals Today

1. That we permit corporations to advertise to children during children’s television programming. Someone is going to burn in hell for a long, long time, while trying to explain why he thought there was nothing wrong with trying to trick an eight-year-old into giving his money to General Foods or Nabisco or Hasbro. Then a host of other people will have to explain why they had a fit over Janet Jackson’s breast but didn’t mind at all that their children saw 25,000 commercials before they spent an hour in school.

2. Government subsidies (often in the form of tax breaks, which is nothing more than a disguised subsidy) to big business corporations while claiming that programs that benefit the poor create dependencies and constitute a “hand-out”. Some Republicans actually argue that an increase in the minimum wage will hurt the poor because it will force those strapped employers to lay off staff.

3. Free Trade. Free Trade is good. It absolutely astounds me that the press report, at face value, the government’s protestations that it is in favor of free trade when, in fact, it is wildly enmeshed in a host of protectionist measures, and the subsidization of agricultural and other industries.

4. Capital Punishment: there is no way to do it right because it always involves hatred and it always involves a conscious act by a government to take away life. How barbarian, really, are we?

5. The quality of television programming. I don’t think anybody even pretends, any more, that broadcasters will ever do any better than the load of crap they deliver to us every day. And it isn’t even enough that they deliberately produce utterly contemptible smut and call it “entertainment”: they also have to interrupt it every ten minutes to run ads which, unimaginably, are even more mind-numbing. Even worse, none of the major networks show any serious documentaries on anything.

6. Psychotropic drugs. Look around the room at any party. If you could ask all of the people on prescription medicines for depression or anxiety to put up their hands, you might be surprised. Surprised because you can’t remember when our society decided that instead of pursuing happiness and peace of mind we would just drug everyone. But that, in fact, is what we do. We never announced it. We never formally commenced a “program”. We did it quietly, circumspectly, discretely. The result is the same. All of us are on happy pills. We’re all on soma.

7. Third World Debt. You can argue as much as you want about teaching those people a little bit of responsibility– that’s like a 300 pound adult man beating up an eight-year-old kid in order to teach him some “responsibility”. The truth is, we are picking the pockets of the poor. The poor pay us. We wring our hands and send piddly little donations to make ourselves feel better, but the bottom line is that the poor send us more money than we send them because we are stronger and we can make them, and that’s the ugly truth.

8. The contracts the Recording Industry Association of America has been allowed to foist upon young talent.

9. Absurd awards for “pain and suffering” given out by American juries for victims of corporate malfeasance. The juries seem to be under the quaint illusion that stockholders of the recalcitrant corporations will reach into their own pockets to pay these awards. The big sub-scandal here: lawyers taking 30% or more of these awards even when they are in the millions or tens of millions.

10. Media concentration of ownership.

11. Government subsidy of professional sports stadiums.