June 2014 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Ray Davies of the Kinks is 70

The Kinks Ultimate Collection showcased the songs I always associated with other bands: Dandy, which I own by Herman’s Hermits, and Stop Your Sobbing, covered by the Pretenders;

ALSO for ABC Wednesday, Round 15, D is for Davies

I loved the early Kinks hits, but I didn’t buy many singles, of anyone. After buying Muswell Hillbillies and the subsequent Everybody’s In Show Biz LPs, I STILL had no Kinks hits collection, and I just don’t know why, because there were plenty of them out there. Got a couple albums from the early 1980s (Give the People What They Want and State of Confusion), and Lost & Found, a live album from 1991.

It wasn’t until early in the 21st century when I finally got The Ultimate Collection. Not only did it have the hits I knew, but it also showcased the songs I always associated with other bands: Dandy, which I own by Herman’s Hermits, and Stop Your Sobbing, covered by the Pretenders; the Pretenders’ lead singer Chrissie Hynde was going out with the chief singer/songwriter of the Kinks, Ray Davies, for a time, and they had a daughter together.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame just last week.

Here’s my post about Ray Davies from five years ago. Listen to the first 75 minutes of Coverville 1034 for 19 Kinks covers, a couple featuring the birthday boy himself.

Favorite Kinks songs

The ones cited as MH were linked previously; the ones starred (*) are linked here.

25. Skin and Bones, from MH

24. Give the People What They Want, from Give the People What They Want (1981) – a kicking song about consumerism, and how the people get harder to please.

23. Holiday, from MH

22. Better Things from GtPWTW – an optimistic ending to an angry album.

21. (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman, from Low Budget (1979) – hey, I had to have the comic title on here, did I not?

20. Complicated Life, from MH

19. Where Have All the Good Times Gone, from The Kink Kontroversy (TKK) (1965)

18. Who’ll Be the Next In Line, b-side of Ev’rybody’s Gonna Be Happy single.

17. Oklahoma U.S.A., from MH

16. Don’t Forget to Dance, from State of Confusion (1983). I think this is quite the sweet song.

15. I’m Not Like Everybody Else, b-side of Sunny Afternoon single (1966). I didn’t know this song until I bought the greatest hits collection.

14. Destroyer from Give the People What They Want (1983). Story is sequel to Lola, and borrows from a couple more Kinks songs as well.

*13. Tired of Waiting for You’ From: Kinda Kinks (KK) (1965)

12. Apeman, from Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970). There’s a song called The Monkey, by Dave Bartholomew, and in different ways, it seems to be the same message.

*11. ‘Till the End of the Day’ from TKK

10. Come Dancing, from SoC.

*9. Lola, from LVPatMPO

*8. Waterloo Sunset, from Something Else by the Kinks (1967)

7. Alcohol from MH

*6. Victoria, from Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)

*5. Sunny Afternoon, from Face to Face (1966)

*4. You Really Got Me, from Kinks (1964)

*3. A Well Respected Man, single (1965)

*2. Celluloid Heroes, from Everybody’s in Show-Biz (1972)

*1. All Day and All of the Night, single (1964)

Will the Kinks re-form? Maybe.
***
Gerry Goffin died. He wrote a lot of songs you know.

Almost on the BBC

International code 44 and all that on my message machine.

I had written this blog post on March 28 about the Adagio, attributed to Albinoni, which also appeared in my Times Union blog the same day. On the latter, I received this comment on April 4 at 7:30 a.m.:

Dear Roger,
I’m making a programme for BBC Radio 4, Soul Music about Albinoni’s Adagio. This series looks at those pieces of music that never fail to move us.
I would love to know more about your choir mom.
Please would you be kind enough to email me with your number so we might have a chat.
With many thanks
Lucy

ALSO, I had written this blog post on April 2 about Marvin Gaye, which again appeared in that day’s TU, and generated THIS comment, also on April 4, at 9:02 a.m.:

Hello Roger, Great article. I’m trying to get in touch with you for a radio programme I making- could you drop me a line please and I’ll explain more.
Milly

I wrote to both of them, letting them know that they had both contacted me, and where the posts had first appeared. Milly wrote back: “Yes I work with Lucy- sorry to trouble you twice! Thanks for getting back to me.” I replied, “I’m not ‘bothered’, just surprised!”

Then I received a telephone call from Lucy on April 6. International code 44 and all that on my message machine. Unfortunately, I was not home. I wrote her back the next day, but never heard back, I gather for time/logistical reasons.

I was only slightly disappointed, but then I thought: “I was considered by the BBC. Twice!”

Moreover, both the granddaughter and the daughter-in-law of Arlene Mahigian, my late choir mom, were touched by the piece.

So it’s all good.

Real, live conversation

I’m not quite sure how to infuse my life with more real, human interactions – as opposed to the facile, day-to-day stuff.

It happened twice in May: lengthy face-to-face talking with friends of mine who don’t live that far away, but with whom I never get a chance to talk anymore.

The first was with my friend Norm, the best man at my marriage to Carol. For over twenty years, we played racquetball together at the YMCA, sometimes with a group of other guys, sometimes just ourselves.

We talked about families. I remember his son as a baby, and now he is spouting facial hair. Both of his kids are in college. And that group of guys went for a time went to Siena College after the Y closed, but it was much less convenient for some of us, and we drifted away.

I’ve long noticed that, even though one may not be best of friends, I learn about how other people think when I’ve played racquetball, volleyball, backgammon, or hearts, or being in a book group, with them. One sees how they think.

It has long been difficult for me to have male friends or even good male acquaintances, and that group met that need I didn’t even know I was seeking.

I had hoped that a couple of groups in the church might have been that collective I guess I had subconsciously been seeking but it didn’t work out. A men’s Bible study just fell apart a few years back from guys being busy. More recently, a book group I left for reasons that are too complicated to go into here; I might go back in the fall, maybe.

Oh, the other person I spoke with was my friend Lynne, who I’ve known since December 1980. She was coming home from a meeting about the shortsightedness of building a casino in, or near, Albany. We talked for quite a long time – two of the same bus number passed by – about social justice issues, environmental concerns, and the like. She lives less than three miles from my house, but I “see” her only on Facebook.

I’m not quite sure how to infuse my life with more real, human interactions – as opposed to the facile, day-to-day stuff – but surely I am needing it badly.

Almost as good: in early June, a lengthy telephone conversation with Alan David Doane.

And because I can: Face the Face by Pete Townsend.

Teevee; remembering Dee, Gwynn, Kasem, Noll

I always regretted the 1994 baseball strike, in part because I wanted to know if Tony Gwynn would hit .400.

I was watching JEOPARDY! per usual. But this was strange: in the six days between June 6 and June 13, inclusive, none of the contestants got the Final correct in five of them, whereas I KNEW four of them, and guessed correctly on the fifth. The one question I got wrong, two of them got right.

These are the six final answers:

20th CENTURY AMERICANS: In 1911 Glenn Curtiss received this document Number 1.
THE MEDITERRANEAN: It’s the only U.N. member country in the Mediterranean where English is an official national language.
SCIENTISTS: As a humorous tribute, an astronomical term equivalent to at least 4 billion has been named for him.
CAPITAL CITY WORDPLAY: Ending in the same 2 letters, these 2 are capitals of a nation that covers a continent & of a nation reaching onto 2 continents.
CURRENT TELEVISION: George Romero declined to direct a few episodes of this series, calling it “basically…just a soap opera”
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: William Sullivan retired from the Foreign Service in 1979; he was the last U.S. Ambassador to this country.

Which one did I get wrong? If you guessed CURRENT TV, you’d be right. Not only don’t I watch that much TV, even when I read about it, it generally doesn’t stick. Even though I knew who George Romero was – creator of Night of the Living Dead – I had no recollection of what the TV show was called.

This is not a complaint. It’s just an observation that, for someone who used to be able to quickly fill out the TV Guide crossword puzzle, I doubt I’d get it half-finished, especially since I’m not reading TV Guide (pretty much since it changed the size to standard magazine format) or Entertainment Weekly (in the last 18 months), I’m pretty much out of the loop unless it’s a big story.

The truth of the matter is that the stuff that’s REALLY interesting to me shows up on YouTube. I don’t even seek it out; it’s either in a newsfeed or occasionally, on someone’s Facebook.

For instance, John Oliver’s show is on HBO. I don’t have HBO, and I don’t WANT HBO; don’t have time to watch it, even if it weren’t an extra charge. But I get to see him bash the owner of the Washington, DC American football team and note the importance of net neutrality.

Jaquandor was ranting about a current Apple commercial. I fully understand his sentiment; as the fat kid who couldn’t climb the rope or do a chin-up, I found gym a humiliating experience, and Mr. Lewis, my gym teacher for five years, a sadistic schmuck. What surprises me is that, somehow, I managed to miss the original Chicken Fat campaign from the 1960s, when I watched LOTS of TV.
***
How does one develop sports rooting interests, or antipathy? Beyond geographic proximity, it can be a number of factors. I was rooting for the New York Rangers to beat the LA Kings for the Stanley Cup (NHL hockey), but it was not to be; NYC is only 150 miles away. My rooting for the San Antonio Spurs over the Miami Heat in the NBA (basketball), who had won the previous two years, was based more on disdain for Miami, who stacked the deck pretty much the way the New York Yankees did in when George Steinbrenner owned the team. Yet, I never hated the Yankees; proximity, and the fact that the very first major league baseball game I saw was at Yankee Stadium (NYY beat the Washington Senators, 4-3), won out.

One of my favorite American football teams not playing in New York or New Jersey was/is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Even when they won four Super Bowls in the 1970s, I still liked them. It couldn’t have been because two of their players, Franco Harris (1950) and Lynn Swann (1952) shared my birthday, as I didn’t know that at the time. Maybe it was because they were rather mediocre before that run. I was sorry to read that Chuck Noll, coach of those SB wins, died last Friday at the age of 82.

But I was REALLY sad to read that baseball player Tony Gwynn died Monday of salivary gland cancer at the age of only 54. He was a class act, playing his whole career with one club, the San Diego Padres. He was a model of consistency as a hitter, which got him into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot and was apparently a terrific guy. I actually saw him play a few times when I would visit my sister in San Diego, and we would catch a game; I’ve been to the San Diego stadium more times than any other major league facility. I always regretted the 1994 baseball strike, in part because I wanted to know if Tony would hit .400; he ended the shortened season at .394. Here’s Ken Levine’s great tribute to Tony Gwynn.

I listened to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 radio program/Top 10 TV show, on and off, for decades. It was fun because he really seemed to enjoy his work. I think I actually got subscriptions to Billboard in the 1980s partly because of him. Another Ken Levine tribute.

I loved Ruby Dee in the movies A Raisin in the Sun and Do The Right Thing, the TV miniseries Roots, and a whole lot more. But it was also the leadership of Ruby and her late husband Ossie Davis in the civil rights struggle that had a great impact on me. They both received Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
Here’s Ruby Dee on the Psyche of Black America. Also, a PBS program called With Ossie and Ruby, an episode featuring the late Gil Scott-Heron (circa 1981) – Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.

Oh, those JEOPARDY! solutions:
A pilot’s license
Malta
Carl Sagan
Canberra (Australia) and Ankara (Turkey)
The Walking Dead – that one I got wrong
Iran

Bullies

I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood.

I had reason recently to reflect on the bullies in my life. Growing up in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, it was what I suppose one would call a lower-middle-class life, with some doing well enough to get by, but others living a more hardscrabble existence.

My school, Daniel S. Dickinson, which I loved – and which I wrote about in 2012 – was a K-9 school that, I learned much later, didn’t always get the most current resources. For instance, we had an ancient music book that still had Old Black Joe in it, which prompted an incident I described WAY back in 2006.

Some of the older kids bullied the younger kids. One time, some guys from fifth or sixth grade, none of whom I knew specifically, thought it would be fun to get a couple of little kids to box. They picked me to fight with this kid named Danny Dervey (or Durvey) who was in my sister’s class three semesters behind me. We were to mix it up so it looked real, or they were going to beat the crap out of us.

Somehow or other, I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood. The bullies were ecstatic, but I was mortified. I held no malice towards the kid. Far as I know, he never held a grudge against me. And I didn’t get in trouble for this, either from the school or my parents.

I have some vague recollection of being in fifth or sixth grade and getting roughed up, but I wasn’t hurt much, and have all but forgotten it.

The only time I ever willingly got into a fight – I thought I wrote about this, but cannot find it – was in fifth grade. This annoying kid named Robert, who was the only other black kid in my class, decided to attack my friend David Doyle, who was the shortest kid of us all; he was not to be confused with David Tita, who was the tallest. Anyway, David Doyle and I were Cub Scouts together, before I quit after a year. An attack on him was like an attack on me, rather like those alliances before World War I.

Robert and I, and there may have been others involved, started mixing it up right in front of the school. But it did not last long; the assistant principal, and junior high school English teacher, Mr. Frenchko, yelled out an upper-floor window, and we scattered.

Robert was academically challenged. He flunked so often, he was eventually in sister Leslie’s class. Later, he somehow managed to pull off a perfect robbery, and only was caught when he told some out-of-town cops so that he might get a ride back home; he went to prison instead.

Then there was the time I was attacked when I was 16, which is a LONG story.

Point is, I’ve somehow managed to avoid the fisticuffs rather well, so far.

(And yes, this is one of those posts that I wrote so I can write about something else.)