Month: August 2015

That Les Green song: Two Brothers

Tomorrow would have been Dad’s 88th birthday.

LesGreenThere is this Civil War song called Two Brothers. I woke up from a nap several months ago thinking about it. Here’s someone’s reflection on the song.

Here are the lyrics, written by Irving Gordon, who may or may not have written “Who’s On First” for Abbott and Costello. And here’s the sheet music.

This version by Georgianna Askoff is appropriately plaintive, whereas Anna Coogan and Joy Mills are a bit too festive for my taste. It was popularized by The Lettermen, though I never heard their version, the B-side to Allentown Jail, until much later.

And I was thinking about it because my father, Les Green, used to perform it. His version seems the most authentic. I can still hear his guitar as he sang: “All on a beautiful” – he’d pick out so, so, si, la, ti -“morning”, with “morn” on a four-note melisma. Wish you could have heard it.

If memory serves – and it so often does not – he sang it far less at the point my sister Leslie and I performed with him as the Green Family Singers, mostly because it was really a solo piece for him. You see it listed on his early playlist.

This is the 15th anniversary of Dad’s death; I scarcely can believe it. Obviously, even my subconscious still thinks about him.

MOVIE REVIEW: Trainwreck

I wonder what Amy Schumer’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thought about the movie Trainwreck?

trainwreckThere’s a TV show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen it, but it is described as “straight from [her] provocative and hilariously wicked mind,” exploring sex and relationships.

So the language and sexuality was not a shock to my system when The Wife and I saw Trainwreck, written by and starring Schumer as a thirtysomething named Amy, who learned early on, from her father Gordon (Colin Quinn), to eschew romantic commitment; so she is either sex-positive or slutty, depending how one views these things.

She can be snarky about the marriage of her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) to Tom (Mike Birbiglia), which meant instant family, with Tom’s son Allister (Evan Brinkman).

Amy is a magazine writer for a publication trying too hard to be cutting edge. She is assigned by her editor Brianna (Tilda Swinton, ever the chameleon) to write about a successful sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who hangs out with his patients, such as basketball player LeBron James (well played by LeBron James). Aaron has the audacity to ask her for a second date, and the tensions ensue.

Despite its explicit nature early on, at the heart of this film is a rom com, though, in the traditional roles, Amy’s the guy. That is not a putdown, only a description, as many of the mostly positive reviews suggested. Plus there are some interesting family dynamics; Amy’s dad was the original trainwreck. The movie’s a tad long, for which I blame director Judd Apatow, and it’s more than a bit sappy at the end.

I liked it when The Wife and I saw it at The Spectrum Theatre a couple of weeks ago. She was unsure early on whether she’d like it, but it turned out to be a winner for her too.

Amy and her father’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have teamed up to fight for gun control following a mass shooting at a screening of the movie in Louisiana.

 

Music Throwback Saturday: Anyone Who Had a Heart

The fact that Black’s version of Anyone Who Had a Heartstalled Warwick’s version at #47 in the UK bugged Warwick even 30 years later.

Dionne WarwickMy Times Union blogger buddy Chuck Miller linked to a version of Anyone Who Had a Heart by someone named Anja Nissen which you can hear HERE or HERE. It’s nice, it’s fine.

But I’m forever a fan of the original of the Burt Bacharach (music) and the late Hal David (lyrics) song, which was the Dionne Warwick version, released in late 1963, and getting to its zenith on three different charts in 1964: #8 on the Top 100, #6 on the rhythm & blues charts, and #2, for three weeks, on the adult contemporary charts.

There were a number of versions over the years. Heck, there was a lot in 1964 alone:

Percy Faith, 1964
Dusty Springfield, 1964
Cilla Black, 1964 #1 in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa.
According to Wikipedia, the fact that Black’s version stalled Warwick’s version at #47 in the UK bugged Warwick even 30 years later.

Petula Clark, in French (Ceux Qui Ont Un Coeur) #7 in France in 1964
Petula Clark, in Italian (Quelli che hanno un cuore) #5 in Italy in 1964
Petula Clark, in Spanish (Tú No Tienes Corazón) #1 in Spain for two weeks in 1964

Four Seasons, 1965
The Lettermen, 1968
Martha and the Vandellas, 1972
Linda Ronstadt, 1992
Josey James, 2012

What’s YOUR favorite version? (Note to Sharp Little Pencil: I think I know your pick.) My second favorite is probably the Ronstadt take. The Vandellas version is interesting, but I’m not sold on it.

Cilla Black; and writing about comic books

So THAT’S what I am, a comics industry observer.

cillaPriscilla Maria Veronica White OBE, the singer and, later, UK television personality, better known as Cilla Black, died this past weekend at the age of 72.

I was waiting impatiently for Dustbury’s take. And he did not disappoint: “Perhaps the very definition of ironic: the first I heard about the death of an iconic Liverpool star was from two girls trying to make it big in Liverpool fifty years later.”

I always associated Cilla with the Beatles, of course. Lennon-McCartney wrote a few songs for her, including Love of the Loved and It’s for You [LISTEN], and she covered Beatles tunes such as Yesterday, For No One, Across the Universe, and The Long and Winding Road.

Moreover, I bought LP The Big Hits From England & U.S.A. back in 1965, featuring songs by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, plus two L&M songs by Peter & Gordon. On Side 2 were songs for the “grownups” by Al Martino, Nat Cole, and two from Cilla, Suffer Now I Must [LISTEN], which was just OK, and the last song on the album You’re My World [LISTEN], which I really loved.

She was introduced to [Beatles manager Brian] Epstein by John Lennon, who persuaded him to audition her. Epstein had a portfolio of local artists but initially showed little interest in her. Her first audition was a failure, partly because of nerves, and partly because the Beatles (who supported her) played the songs in their usual vocal key rather than re-pitching them for Black’s voice. In her autobiography What’s It All About? she wrote:

I’d chosen to do “Summertime”, but at the very last moment I wished I hadn’t. I adored this song, and had sung it when I came to Birkenhead with the Big Three, but I hadn’t rehearsed it with the Beatles and it had just occurred to me that they would play it in the wrong key. It was too late for second thoughts, though. With one last wicked wink at me, John set the group off playing. I’d been right to worry. The music was not in my key and any adjustments that the boys were now trying to make were too late to save me. My voice sounded awful. Destroyed—and wanting to die—I struggled on to the end.

Check out Cilla Recording Alfie in Abbey Road Studios with Burt Bacharach, and Beatles producer George Martin.

Now that Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show, and there is a slew of articles about him, I’m fascinated by the program’s evolution, best covered by the New York Times in Jon Stewart and ‘The Daily Show’: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at 9 Essential Moments. I watched the program occasionally by 2004 but recorded and viewed it regularly for only the last seven or eight years.

Thanks to that rascal Alan David Doane, I’m in Trouble with Comics, again, trying to do some writing about the four-color phenomenon as I did most recently with the late, lamented Flashmob Fridays.

So far:
Comics Industry Observers Respond to Black Lightning News; so THAT’S what I am, a comics industry observer.
The TWC group answer the question, “What single comics creator has had the greatest influence over how you perceive the comics artform, and why? Can’t believe someone else selected MY pick.
*I review Archie & Friends Wacky Wild West

The Comics Beat touted the TWC return, and Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter has taken notice as well.

Restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965

“It would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything.”

votingrightsact_0The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson because “Congress [had] determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment,” which had been ratified on February 3, 1870.

“Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans.”

The Act has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, resulting in a recent surge in voter ID laws, cuts to early voting and gerrymandering. One of the heroes of the Selma march of March 1965, John Lewis says voter ID laws are ‘poll taxes by another name’.

The 2014 midterm election turnout was the lowest in 70 years, when World War II was an understandable reason for failure to exercise the franchise. President Obama, who did NOT “suggest requiring everyone to vote”, did recognize that “it would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country…” As my friend Steve Bissette put it, “It’s discouraging how many folks I know (especially younger voters) rationalize and justify opting out. ‘It’s rigged’ is easy when your refusal to vote cinches the rigging.”

At least, in June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the right of states to set up independent, non-partisan committees to draw the district maps that determine seats in Congress.

The trend for most of this country’s history was to expand the right to cast the ballot, from requiring direct elections of US Senators, to allowing women and 18-year-olds to vote. This retrenchment in recent years is discouraging for my sense of what democracy should look like. See A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act from the New York Times magazine.

One last thing: from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, learn about the disenfranchisement of Americans living in U.S. territories.

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