Category: Music

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CBC in the Afternoon

I’m becoming less and less interested in CBC in the afternoon.

The other day, the hostess, Gill Deacon, was talking about the up-coming 3D version of Peanuts, and describing how she can’t wait to see Lucy pull the football back when Charley Brown tries to kick it.

She wants the movie to be the one she already saw? She can’t wait to laugh again at an old, old joke? She is excited about the idea that the producers of this movie will not be able to come up with a new idea but will have to repeat an old one?

I’ll bet she actually tunes in to see reruns of “Happy Days” and gets wet just thinking about Fonzie going “EEEHHEHHHH!”. Again. And again. And again. And again. And do it again, Fonzie, it was so funny. Please? Do it again. “Eeeehhhh!”. Oh! (Hysterical giggles).

So this woman wants to go to those parties where your Uncle George tells you the exact same story for the 30th time. So she wants to go see the Eagles on tour doing the same hits they first performed in 1979. And Carol Burnett do her mugging, and Tim Conway, and Jerry Lewis and Red Skeleton.

There was a time when I would listen to CBC on my way home from work and, often, quickly look up the name of an interesting artist they had played and get more of his or her music to listen to.  I have not done that in years because the CBC in the afternoon no longer plays anything worth hearing again.

Gill Deacon is popular among many of my friends.  I’m baffled.  I don’t know if any of them ever try to imagine what a really good radio hostess would sound like.  She would not sound like Gill Deacon, who cannot complete a single complex sentence without false starts.  She is inarticulate and trite, often sounding like a college sophomore on her first date.

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Elitists

Why is it that our society seems to admire, without reservation, those who strive for the best in sports and athletic endeavors, and despise those who strive for the same thing in the arts?

If you love the world cup of music, the championship of films, the record-setting paintings, and poetry that is better than anyone else’s poetry, you are considered a snob and an elitist. And I’m not talking about Oscar or Grammy winners here, which are the equivalent of TV reality show competitions. I am talking about “The White Ribbon”, “The Third Man”, “Blade Runner”, “Solaris”, “The Seventh Seal”, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits….

All right… I see how it breaks down. We know the exact time of the best 100 meters, and the exact score of the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final.

We don’t know if Leonard Cohen is really just a hack or not.

We do know that we love a lot of films that people like me consider to be utter drivel, like “The Reader”, “The Book Thief”, “Shawshank Redemption”, “Forrest Gump”, “Hugo”, “The Departed”, and so on, and so on.

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Mumford and Sons

Roll away your stone,
I’ll roll away mine
Together we can see what we will find
Don’t leave me alone at this time
For I’m afraid of what I will discover inside
‘Cause you told me that
I wouldn’t find a home
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals
Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I see
It seems that all my bridges have been burned
But you say, “That’s exactly how this grace thing works”
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start

I’ve tried and tried but I just can’t bring myself to love “Mumford and Sons”. A lot of people who know my taste in music have recommended them to me and suggested that they are not like most pop bands: they are serious. Their music has substance. They have energy and passion.

The lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” (above) give you a pretty good idea of what they’re up to. I think I like what they’re trying to do– inject some substance into popular acoustic based folk-rock– but it always sounds to me a little too self-consciously artsy and definitely pretentious. “I’m afraid of what I’ll discover inside” isn’t very startling, really, and isn’t a very compelling evocation of self-searching or grief or guilt or anything. “Fragile substance of my soul”? “While my character it steals”? As the lines follow each other, they go nowhere. As the images succeed each other in your head you should realize that they don’t have any connection to each other. When exactly did this character-stealing happen? What were you doing at the time? Who were you thinking of? The answer is, “a song”, “a song”, and “a song”.

The answers, in a great song, is something like “one night after I kicked Rosie out my apartment”, “masturbating”, “Lisa”. Or something like “but her reply came from Anchorage”.

There is nothing in the lyrics of “Roll Away Your Stone” that suggests any particular real experience or feeling– just something that sounds like a serious consideration of something that sounds like seriousness.

Oddly– and I mean that– it’s fairly typical of their lyrics. Something that starts off with a generalized image of soulfulness but never really connects to any real idea.

It’s empty in the valley of your heart
The son it rises slowly as you walk
Away from all the fears and all the faults you left behind

And “you forgave and I won’t forget”… what? What did she forgive? What did he do that was forgiven? What was forgotten? I don’t think they think it matters– I think they feel that the idea of forgiveness just floating out there is enough to move you. It doesn’t move me. It invites you to put your own experiences into that generalized statement but that makes it a weak song.  You can get the same idea on poster from “Successories”.

Everything I’ve heard from them is weak in the same way. Vague and unspecific and generalized and rather antiseptic and platitudinous. Compare it to:

Did I disappoint you?
Leave a bad taste in your mouth?  (U2)

The “bad taste in your mouth” is visceral and tart. Or:

I was down at the New Amsterdam
Starin’ at this yellow-haired girl
Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation
With a black-haired flamenco dancer (Counting Crows)

Specific place– the New Amsterdam–, specific girl– with yellow hair– and then you can go somewhere, the singer’s desperation for girls and success, his urge to throw himself at something and hope it sticks. Or…

There’s a note underneath your front door
That I wrote twenty years ago
Yellow paper and a faded picture
And a secret in an envelope

If Mumford and Sons rewrote the song, it would sound like this:

All your notes are under my doors
All my past thoughts expressed in words
I can hardly remember anything
Except my darkest secrets

So which is more evocative? More powerful? Is there any doubt? The Civil Wars song intrigued me immediately: what was the secret? Why couldn’t he give the message in person? What’s happened 20 years ago?  You don’t need the answers to those questions to be drawn in to the sense of regret, missed opportunities, and sorrow.

And just to rub my nose in it, Mumford and Sons puts out a video of themselves performing at the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado and the audience is just jumping! Just jumping! Waving their arms and mouthing the words and just so consummately  rapt, in that choreographed fake “look at us whip the crowd into a frenzy” production style that I find more than a little distasteful.

You wonder where they are going with this. What’s the principle at work here– the crowd in a frenzy, interspersed with cuts of the band jumping and gyrating and demonstrating “passion” don’t you know, with the swooping camera work that is almost a sign of desperation: there is nothing on the stage that is interesting enough to obviate the need to make that camera move, to compel you to admit that there is something interesting here. This swooping camera! Why, a static camera just cannot capture the adoration of this bulging crowd of acolytes! Wait– there’s music.

Who’s more interesting than Mumford and Sons:

Bon Ivor
Dandy Warhols
Arcade Fire
Civil Wars
Ryan Adams
Brian Jonestown Massacre

Who’s less interesting:

Taylor Swift
Lady Gaga
Beyonce

Who is Similarly Lyrically Stunted

Tragically Hip

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The Sins We Know

“I couldn’t tell if that was you or the radio”. Keith Richards’ mom, shortly after he began learning the guitar.

I’m really not sure who said it first or if it was ever said first but it is no secret that a good strategy for a liar is to admit to the sins everyone already knows you committed, or which you don’t mind them knowing about, so that people will believe you when you deny everything else.

You need to remember this when you read “Life”, Keith Richard’s remarkable autobiography. He lavishly admits to everything– that we already know about him. Maybe he even throws in a few sins we’ve haven’t seen in the tabloids yet. He even admits to driving while stoned, risking his own and others’ lives. And he admits to being an asshole at times.

Well, what else is there?

Richards was an incorrigible drug user, of almost everything that was out there in the 1960’s and 70’s. He was arrested numerous times, occasionally prosecuted, but never served a prison term of any length whatsoever. I’m not sure he admits to why he didn’t serve a prison term. Well, yes, actually he does hint at the fact that he knew the right people. That he was privileged, because he was a rich, successful artist. One time, he called the owner of Dole Pineapples, whose daughter had taken a shine to him, to help evade a serious charge in Hawaii. Like magic, charges were dropped, and his stash was even returned, and everything was fine. If there is a problem with this, Richards doesn’t know it.

If he got into an argument with someone about whether he should be driving while stoned, he is always in the position of being able to say “fuck you, I don’t care what you think, if I feel like driving while I’m smashed, I will, and you can’t stop me.” Money is power– enormous power. What are the consequences to him if you don’t like him anymore because he might kill somebody on the road, or because he stole his son, Marlon’s, childhood away from him, or abandoned people, or introduced them to the drugs that later killed them? There’s nuance in everything and when you are Keith Richards, that’s all that matters– it’s enough. In the arc of that nuance, you can justify yourself.

That and the money.

 

Noted:

Keith takes more than a few shots at Mick Jagger. One gets the impression that he won’t mind, really, if Jagger takes a few shots of his own when his own inevitable biography appears. You get the feeling that Keith would think, fair enough.

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Anton Newcomb

I have no respect for anyone working for any major label in any capacity whatsoever in the executive. They’re all liars. They’re all mediocre people with no talent. They don’t know talent. They don’t understand music in any way whatsoever.
Genesis P’orridge , Psychic TV

Anton started using heroin heavily…. Dig!

You can learn almost anything important there is to know about the music industry by watching the film “Dig!”, about Anton Newcomb and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, his band, and Courtney Taylor and the Dandy Warhols.

The Dandy Warhols, having deeply impressed the A & R department, was signed by Capitol Records who put up $400,000 to film a video for one of their songs. Their concept for the video was a bit weird and, after spending the $400 K, they didn’t sound too sure they even liked it.

The Video

Is the video about Anton Newcomb? He may have thought so. After the Warhols produced an album called “Not if you Were the Last Junkie on Earth”, Newcomb produced an album called “Not if you Were the last Dandy on Earth”.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre received money to record an album. Anton Newcomb took the money and built a home studio with it instead, so they could do a lot of recording at minimal cost. Then he failed to produce an album because he “started using heroin heavily”.

Anton Newcomb has “issues”. He screams at band-mates during gigs and sometimes assaults them. He informs staff at the record label that he is going to make them a lot of money– a LOT of money. He seems obsessively jealous of any attention given to the Dandy Warhols.

The Warhols sold a song (Bohemian Like You) to cell phone company in Europe which turned the song into a hit which made the Warhols very successful, in Europe. They had some difficulty translating that success into America.

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Music Industry Economics 101

Only about 1 in 10 signed bands make money for the record labels.

What does that mean? How can they possibly continue to operate with that astronomical failure rate?

It’s simple: they use a complex system of charges and counter-charges to bleed the successful bands of mo

ney to cover their losses with the unsuccessful bands.

Why is this allowed? Because artists are inherently random and disorganized and unconcerned about the legal implications of the agreements they sign with the record company.

And if you ever hear an artist say they are completely satisfied and happy with the deal they have signed you can be reasonably assured that they don’t understand it.

Not one bit of it.

See Tom Petty.

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Idiotic Folk Songs

Donovan Leitch, the Scottish folksinger (best known for “Mellow Yellow”) inexplicably recorded an insipid song, “Remember the Alamo” on “What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid”, around 1966 I think. It was always an oddity, released, as it was, in the late 1960’s, amid a plethora of antiwar songs like “Billy, Don’t be a Hero”. As a single, it failed to chart and was withdrawn amid a dispute between record labels. Donovan became the very emblem of 1960’s Flower Child, visiting the Maharishi Yogi, singing about meadows and hurly-gurlies and Jennifer Juniper, who was actually Patti Boyd’s entrancing younger sister.

“Remember the Alamo” repeats the myth of Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword, challenging his men to fight an overwhelmingly large fast approaching Mexican force.

A hundred and eighty
were challenged by Travis
to die…

Doesn’t that put it eloquently?

This is an unusually perverse myth designed to ameliorate the perception that Travis forced his men to die in an utterly futile battle in order to gratify his own perverse ambition.

If only… sure, if there was ever a situation in which a soldier really gave up his life so that others could live or be free, sure, that would be a hell of an honorable thing to do.

It has almost never been done.

It is believed to be done every time a soldier points his gun at someone.

Soldiers are there to kill for their country– not to die for their country. There is not a general in the world who has any real use for a soldier who would die for his country. Certainly Exxon and Dupont and General Motors don’t need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country and kill themselves. They need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country to kill other young deluded males and take their oil.

Even suicide bombers need to do it in a crowd.

Fear not little darling of dying
If this world be
sovereign and free
For we’ll fight to the last
for as long as liberty be

What the hell is the point of “sovereign and free” if you are dead? And is that really what you are fighting for?

James Bowie, incidentally, is described in some accounts as, among other things, a “slave-trader”. This doesn’t get mentioned often, if at all, in other accounts of his life.  It doesn’t get mentioned in the song.

 

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Remember the Idiots at the Alamo

It will be placed in a Mylar sleeve, mounted between sheets of antireflective plexiglass, placed in a crate and transported from Austin to San Antonio by a fine arts shipper with an escort of state troopers. It will be displayed in a custom-built case that will filter most ultraviolet light. Officers known as Alamo Rangers, private security guards and plainclothes off-duty police officers, will patrol or stand guard. The project will cost more than $100,000, the majority of which will be private donations.

NY Times, October 3, 2012

The document in question is a letter from William Travis sent from The Alamo in the days just before Santa Ana arrived with the Mexican army. It is a relic and this hysterical worship of it is ridiculous. Travis writes “Victory or death!” Rick Perry repeated the phrase, with a straight face, when he ran for president last year.

The purpose of the security precautions, with the “Alamo Rangers”, off-duty police, and private security guards is to try to convince you and I that there really is something very, very important about this letter. There really is. It is so sacred, so holy, and so monumental, that nefarious persons all around the world would take it if they could. It must be guarded by very straight-faced armed men. It must be transported in a special vehicle with an escort of state troopers.

The board that overseas the archives commission was not impressed with these precautions and warns that it might not approve the transfer of the document to San Antonio to be displayed, in February, at the Alamo.

Lt. Col. William Barret Travis was an idiot.

Travis sacrificed something of infinite value– his own life– for a brief and bloody flip through a fringe way-station on the path to manifest destiny. The fight was not about freedom: it was about taking land from Mexico on behalf of American speculators and slave-traders. These people were not fighting for freedom of religion or expression or the right to vote or join a union or put up a Christmas tree. They were fighting to perpetuate a land distribution system that allowed a select few to accumulate very, very large swatches of land through trickery and deceit so they could resell it to “pioneers” at inflated prices. The pioneers could then use slave labor (illegal in Mexico) to farm their lands.

They always cry “freedom, freedom” and they always take your gold, your oil, your wheat, your children, your drugs, your land. They cry “freedom, freedom” while protecting your pimps and casinos. They sing glorious praises of freedom, freedom, as they sell you out to Exxon or IBM or Shell.

General Sam Houston didn’t think much of the Alamo in terms of strategic importance– for reasons that became obvious– and chose to abandon it. This was a perfectly rational, sound decision. He wasn’t surrendering to Santa Anna: he was conducting a strategic retreat so he could regroup his army and fight again another day, on better terms, and with less needless sacrifice of lives. Houston was an oddity for military commanders in his day: careful, prudent, cautious. He eventually prevailed, at San Jacinto, but he took some heat in the meantime.

Needless? Texas, you may not know, was a part of Mexico in 1821 (it was originally part of the Spanish colonies). The United States negotiated a border with Mexico which confirmed Texas as Mexican territory. However, American settlers ignored the agreement and violated the treaty by moving into the territory. Santa Ana, in the meantime, had rescinded the Mexican constitution and made himself dictator.

Eventually, the American settlers organized, formed an army, and declared independence. One of the reasons? Mexico had outlawed slavery.

The Battle of the Alamo took place February 23 – March 6, 1836. The decisive battle of the war was fought shortly afterwards in San Jacinto.  The Mexicans were badly routed there and Santa Ana capitulated and signed a new treaty. He had been captured dressed as a common soldier, but was given away by his own men when they acknowledged him as “presidente”, apparently.

In 1845, Texas, having completed the charade of independence,  was granted statehood.

The monument in San Jacinto says this: “Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world…” It would have been fun to sit on the meeting that chose that phrase. I would have liked to hear their ranking of “decisive battles of the world”.  Come on– tells us.  Waterloo?  Stalingrad?  Marathon?  Gaugamela?  Metaurus?

Houston, as I said, didn’t think it was smart to defend the Alamo against a vastly superior force. He sent James Bowie to the fort to remove the artillery and destroy the entire complex. It was Colonel James Neill who decided that the men under his command should honor his own ego with the sacrifice of their lives. Then he left.

Bowie, Travis, and Davy Crockett stayed. Travis and Bowie argued over who was in charge. Neill returned to settle the dispute and then left again. This was a wise decision.

When the Mexican army arrived, Bowie tried to negotiate a surrender. Yes, he did. Travis, mad for self-abasement and morbid glory, disagreed with Bowie and fired a cannon at the Mexican camp, and sent his own hard-liner to meet with the Mexicans.

The Mexicans, in any case, were not in the mood for taking prisoners. Apparently there is a kind of flag you raise if you intend to murder prisoners. They raised this flag.

Most of what you have heard about the Alamo since is blather. The Americans seem to think that out-killing the Mexicans from within a fortified compound was the most incredible awesomest achievement of any army anywhere in the entire history of the entire world. The movies and the bombast are intended to encourage today’s young people to sign up for more bloodletting when required, as when our oil supplies are in question.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

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Roy Orbison: “A Black and White Night”

Roy Orbison has one of the three or four truly great voices of rock’n’roll. In 1988, just a year or so before he died of a heart attack at 52 (December 6, 1988), he recorded a tribute concert to himself called “A Black and White Night”.

You may wonder, what on earth do I mean by “to himself”. I mean that the project was financed, managed, and controlled by Orbison’s production company. It was “directed” by Tony Mitchell, a gentleman from my home town, Kitchener, Ontario. But Orbison had final cut and control of the film.

This is not the same kind of film as the one we got when Marty Scorcese directed the greatest rock’n’roll film of all time “The Last Waltz” with The Band (some would argue “Stop Making Sense” with the Talking Heads).

There is no rational artistic reason why it’s in black and white, and this video is a poster child for why some people believe in the principle of artistic economy, which is, if you don’t have any ideas at all about what you are doing with the camera (or mic, or paintbrush, or keyboard), replace artistry with volume or quantity. Go up to 11. Or, In this case, have the camera swoop back and forth and up and down and left and right and in and out, for no reason whatsoever other than to make it appear that you are doing something with the camera to make this production visually interesting.

There are moments when the musicians appear to be out of sync. There are even moments where they appear to be hamming it up. Could be that an editor dumped in a few shots taken out of sequence just for effect. Or there were dubs.

“A Black & White Night” is well recorded. Too well-recorded. I am convinced it was dubbed, though every effort appears to have been made to make it appear to be a live recording. You would think that nowadays it would be easy to find out the truth: it’s not. I’ve been searching the internet and all I can find it indirect references to it and drippy, adoring reviews by slavish worshippers of Roy Orbison.

Let’s keep that straight: I am an admirer of Orbison but here it is: Orbison is a truly great but one-dimensional romanticist whose work has limited importance. He was the master of the paranoid, masochistic, break-up song, in which the pain of the loss is elevated to a near hysterical embrace of spiritual and emotional suffering.

You might be surprised that this mode can only go so far.

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight

Yes, those opening lines, the black suit, the sunglasses– truly magnificent.

But a lot of his early success may well have been due to arranger Fred Foster at Monument Records (where Orbison recorded from 1959 to 1965). After Foster left, Orbison rarely charted, until his return during the nostalgia craze in the 1980’s.

But, like Elvis and Michael Jackson, he was a pop star, and never more than that, and he doesn’t belong in the category of the truly visionary, brilliant minds that made rock music worth paying attention to, and made it more relevant and interesting than any other musical style in the past fifty years.

People who tell you the contrary just want to believe that a facile adoration of the sound of a voice is just as valid as an intelligent grasp of the fundamentals of music and idiom and lyric and melody and arrangement in terms of judging a musical performance.

Obscure note: like Elvis, Roy Orbison died on the toilet.

You really should see the performance of “Crying”, in Spanish, in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”.

The handful of truly great voices in rock’n’roll:

Roy Orbison
Judith Durham (The Seekers)
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
Jennifer Warnes
Aretha Franklin
Janis Joplin
Van Morrison

Burton Cummings

And a bigger handful of extraordinary voices:

Judy Collins
Elvis Presley
Art Garfunkel
Tom Waits
Susan Jacks
Reverend Al Green
James Brown
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Over-rated Voices:

Freddie Mercury
Kate Bush
Roger Daltrey
Linda Ronstadt
K. D. Lang
Bruce Springsteen

Why over-rated?

A great singer puts his or her voice into the service of the music, not into the service of the singer’s ego, K.D. Lang.  Roger Daltrey has a big voice, but he’s not really a particularly good singer. Linda Ronstadt: ditto: she gets louder and softer and louder again. She wails.  Listen to her version of “Different Drum” and then listen to Susan Jacks’ version: that’s the difference between wailing and singing.  Kate Bush is a diva: fabulous voice, and a show-off.  Burton Cummings has a great voice and he can sing, but never covered anything really super interesting. One imagines that if he did, the limitations would reveal themselves. Freddie Mercury can never be forgiven for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Don’t even get me started:

Whitney Houston (whine)
Michael Jackson (grunt, falsetto, grunt)

No Longer Qualified

Almost all recent singers, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katie Perry, Britney Spears, Kesha, Lil Wayne, Nicky Minaj, Ariana Grande, and so on and so on, use Autotune.  They are cheating.  And does Autotune really make them sound better?  No, it doesn’t.  It just speeds up the recording process and takes out the obvious flubs.

Some of these artists claim that autotune is an artistic component of “their sound”.  Oh yes, and EPO is an integral part of Lance Armstrong’s “ride”.

Great Songwriters and their voices

Bob Dylan is actually a pretty good vocalist on his earlier albums, up to “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”.  Singing isn’t just about pitch: there’s phrasing and intonation and rhythm.  Around “Saved” his voice went into the tank and I don’t think any one around him ever summoned the courage to tell him the truth.  His voice is cosmetically in the class of Tom Waits but he’s not nearly as judicious with it’s use.

As the years go by, I think less and less of Bruce Springsteen as a vocalist the more I hear him.  Even when I go back to “Born to Run”, I find it harder and harder to overlook his limitations. His voice is not really much prettier than early Dylan’s, but Dylan is far more interesting, in phrasing, intonation; sometimes a good sneer can come in handy.

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PBS’ Soundstage

When I was in college back in the 1970’s, the only decent music program on TV was Soundstage (earlier known as “Made in Chicago”), which presented relatively current, relatively serious artists like Harry Chapin, Arlo Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Emmy-Lou Harris, in a one-hour format, no commercial breaks, no light shows, no lip-synching.

Okay– so they also presented– geez!– Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees. It absolutely blows my mind that the same minds that would put together a program like this for Emmy-Lou Harris would think it was a great idea to give the Bee Gees an hour of rapt attention. The Bee Gees were worse than mediocre. They were aggressively mediocre. Their mediocrity pounded you on the face and stuck it’s waxy fingers into your ears and wobbled your head from side-to-side to scream at you that there is not a single interesting thing musically or intellectually in any of this noise you are hearing.

But then again, in 1976 Lightfoot appeared on Hee-Haw to lip-synch “Sundown”.

Anyway, two or three of my favorite shows are on PBS: the News Hour which is about the only television news program that I watch without getting nauseous nowadays (I know I’m mean but even Peter Mansbridge looks and sounds like a pharmaceutical salesman– think about it– doesn’t he always seem about to ask, “and how often should the patient take this dosage, Mary?”) and “Frontline” (documentaries) and “Inside Washington”. And “Nova” can be pretty cool thought it can also get annoyingly breathless at times. And cheesy.

But mostly, when they need money, they present John Sebastian presenting endlessly recycled clips of “Do You Believe in Magic” or the Mamas and the Papas singing “California Dreaming” on Hullabaloo, in bathtubs, or Peter, Paul, and Mary doing their farewell concert to end all farewell concerts at Carnegie Hall. Over and over and over again. And over and over and over again. And over and over and over and over again. I don’t think they have done pledge week once in the last 20 years without showing Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Lemon Tree” or Pete Seeger doing “Turn, Turn, Turn” and John Sebastian strumming his autoharp and creeping me out with that harmless, aimless expression, grinning and looking folksy and trying to make you believe that the 1960’s was a happy place of delightful experimentation and joyful frolics in psychedelic meadows of unicorns and marshmallows.

When it’s not John Sebastian and the 1960’s, it’s Victor Borge, Perry Como, or Harry Belafonte. Who runs this network?

It doesn’t make sense to me. The average age of the PBS viewer must surely be sliding ever closer to the grave– they will, sooner or later, require younger viewers to survive the next round of Republican attacks. To attract younger viewers, they have to start bringing in musical artists like Leslie Feist, Arcade Fire, Royal Wood, Bon Ivor, Conor Orbest, Wilco, please, anybody from the last ten or fifteen years!

I am never not astounded that Lawrence Welk is actually still shown on TV, on Sunday, PBS.  Really?  Seriously?  Who is running this network?