December 2015 - Page 5 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Music Throwback Saturday: STAX Christmas

Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday was a minor success in 1967.

When I obtained two box sets of the Memphis-based soul label STAX several years back, I noticed that there were a few holiday-related singles in the collections. Here are just three.

Booker T. and the MG’s

The STAX house band, included Booker T. Jones (organ, piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg, replaced in 1965 by Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass), and Al Jackson, Jr. (drums). They also had some hit singles.

The group released a holiday album, In The Christmas Spirit in 1966. It put out one seasonal single that year, Jingle Bells, b/w Winter Wonderland. “Jingle Bells peaked at #20 on Billboard’s list of Christmas-related singles in 1966. It did not make the standard pop charts.”

The next December, STAX released another single, Silver Bells b/w the non-album track, Winter Snow.
Booker is still playing music, often with Steve Cropper.

LISTEN to Silver Bells with the painfully lovely Winter Snow at 2:30
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William Bell

The singer/songwriter/pianist had a number of soul hits. Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday was a minor success in 1967, getting to #33 on the r&b charts.
Bell was still performing at the beginning of 2015.

LISTEN to Everyday Will Be Like A Holiday
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Isaac Hayes

The keyboard player/songwriter for STAX, the singer, who died in 2008), released a couple of albums in 1970, but also a holiday, non-album single, one that invokes Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells, and We Three Kings, among other songs.

LISTEN to The Mistletoe and Me

TIME Person of the Year: not Donald Trump

‘This Will Be The End Of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year.

Feh. This will be about Donald Trump. Eventually.

Among the things that matter less to the general public in the 21st Century than it did in the 20th, unless it is to complain about the choice: TIME magazine’s Person of the Year, started back in 1927, in part “to remedy the editorial embarrassment earlier that year of not having aviator Charles Lindbergh on its cover following his historic trans-Atlantic flight.”

The magazine annually awards the title to an individual or group who, for better or worse, has had the biggest impact on the world and news over the course of the past year. The list has included every US President elected after Calvin Coolidge.

I recall the tremendous backlash TIME received as a result of naming Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 as what was then Man of the Year, even though it was totally justified after the Iran hostage crisis. They’d picked controversial figures before: Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942), and Nikita Khrushchev (1957).

In 2001, Time’s Person of the Year, following the September 11 attacks, was New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although, arguably Osama bin Laden was a more likely choice.

In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders won the Readers’ Poll for TIME Person of the Year, and some people were all indignant that he wasn’t one of TIME’s eight finalists. I LIKE Bernie Sanders, and I’ll probably vote for him in the Democratic primary for President in April 2016. Perhaps he hasn’t had as much of an impact because much of the media has decided he can’t win the nomination.

TIME’s editors have narrowed the 2015 list down to eight candidates. When I voted Tuesday morning, with 159,124 VOTES cast, these were the readers’ results:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 36% – Leader of ISIS.
Vladimir Putin, 29% – President of Russia (Ukraine, war on DAESH).
Donald Trump, 15% – Frontrunner for Republican presidential nomination.
Travis Kalanick, 10% -CEO of Uber.
Black Lives Matter activists, 7% – protested inequality towards African Americans.
Angela Merkel, 2% – German chancellor (economic strife in Eurozone, Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis).
Caitlyn Jenner, 1% – coming out as a transgender woman.
Hassan Rouhani, 0% – president of Iran.

One could make the case for al-Baghdadi, certainly, or Putin. But Angela Merkel is a reasonable choice.

Of course, the most unreasonable Donald Trump was having none of that. If a journalist of my Facebook acquaintance hadn’t verified it, I would have thought the item at the top of this page was made up.

I’ve tried to ignore the Donald, I really have. But he keeps saying outrageous things, and his voting base keeps eating it up. Even before his latest blathering, I found myself with several interesting links.

The Political F-word: When and how should we talk about fascism? and Donald Trump and others are proving it: we can’t handle the truth and Is Trump Actually a Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In!, and Why One Political Science thinks he could actually win.

After Donald Trump’s comments demanding Muslims be barred from entering the country, based on a misleading poll, we’ve discovered DT’s Bottomless Bottom. “The GOP front-runner is tapping into a brutal xenophobia that’s at once un-American and uniquely American.” He could be the US equivalent to Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right party in France.

One article is titled We Are No Longer Entertained. I haven’t been entertained for weeks, myself. Exasperated by people who I know to be intelligent, yet apparently contemplating supporting DT for President, I find him most unfunny.

Not that he cannot be skewered by comedy. The Borowitz Reports spoofs Trump Supporters Disappointed He Only Wants to Ban One Religion. Plus this cartoon, Donald Trump, super villain. Plus the all-too-true bit from the Onion: ‘This Will Be The End Of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year. That sounds a lot like me.

The Washington Post opines Why Christians must speak out against Donald Trump’s Muslim remarks. And I have.

Of course, suddenly almost EVERYONE is distancing themselves from Trump NOW, even ~~Darth Vader~~ Dick Cheney. The Republicans want the Donald’s enthusiastic voters, but not him. And they fear that if he isn’t treated “fairly” by the GOP, he’d consider a third-party challenge.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Martian

What got me was the true optimism of The Martian, a can-do attitude pretty much throughout without being too nerdy.

Despite generally positive reviews for The Martian (93% on Rotten Tomatoes), I was a little worried about watching a long movie (144 minutes) with Matt Damon as an astronaut, after seeing a long movie (166 minutes) LAST year with Matt Damon as an astronaut. That previous film was the nearly impenetrable Interstellar.

Or maybe it’d be an isolating film, like Tom Hanks and a volleyball in Cast Away. Or, since I understand the science of The Martian was reported to be pretty much spot on, based on a very wonkish book, that it might be boring as all get out.

It is none of the above. You’ll laugh out loud! You’ll cry! You’ll believe a man can grow potatoes in an inhospitable environment! You’ll be amazed how appropriate the unlikely soundtrack is; the choice for the end credits is inspired.

The cast is quite excellent, with Jessica Chastain as the astronaut commander who feels guilty, but not depressingly so; Michael Peña (who I saw in Ant-Man) as another astronaut; Jeff Daniels as the politics-balancing NASA administrator; the fascinating Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Mackenzie Davis, the surprising Donald Glover, and especially Aksel Hennie as various NASA staff; and Benedict Wong as the overwrought Jet Propulsion Lab guy.

The one really false note was Daniels’ character taking about a small margin for error, followed almost immediately by some problem.

But what got me was the true optimism of The Martian, a can-do attitude pretty much throughout without being too nerdy. Damon’s Watley keeps himself sane by trying to “science the s@#!” out of his resources, countries negotiate how to work together, people around the world sharing a single vision. THAT was what made me teary-eyed in this Ridley Scott film, a united planet when we don’t seem to have it right now. In some way, the politics are more utopian than the science.

I wish The Wife had gone to see this with me Sunday night, as I walked home from the Madison Theatre through the London-like fog.

The Late Great Johnny Ace, and other songs

I have always loved the backstory regarding Lennon’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night.

I’ve written often enough about John Lennon, especially on his birthday (October 9), and on this date, that I was musing on what to write on this 35th anniversary of his death. You’ll see I’ve mentioned SOMETHING about John EVERY December 8 since this blog started in 2005, except in 2007, although it was more oblique in some years than others.

In any case, I found this link to Top 5 songs written in tribute to John Lennon. Four of them I had actually put on a compilation disc together some years ago, along with:

songs written by one or more Beatles but performed by others, e.g., It’s For You by Three Dog Night; Goodbye by Mary Hopkin; Fame by David Bowie
songs about the Beatles: Beatles, Please Come Back by Gigi Parker And The Lonelies; I Dig Rock And Roll Music by Peter, Paul & Mary
*even songs by AND about the Beatles or their members: Glass Onion from Anthology 3; Early 1970 – Ringo Starr; When We Was Fab- George Harrison.

The one tribute song from the above list I was unfamiliar with was Queen’s Life is Real (Song for Lennon).

The others:
Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny) by Elton John
I have always loved the backstory regarding Lennon’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night; its success meant John had to play at Elton’s MSG concert in 1974, which eventually meant a reconciliation between John and Yoko.
Here’s a 1999 live version of Empty Garden.

Here Today by Paul McCartney
When I first heard it, I thought it was a bit treacly; I’ve quite changed my mind. Certainly, by the time I watched the live 2009 NYC version, I was in a totally different head.
I wish that John and Paul had shown up at the Saturday Night Live studio back in 1975.

All Those Years Ago by George Harrison
George modified the lyrics of a song he had written for Ringo because the drummer thought the song was too high in his range. It made a lot of people happy that the song featured vocal contributions from Paul and Linda McCartney, as well as Ringo’s original drum part because it was a big hit.

The Late Great Johnny Ace by Paul Simon
This song segues from a tale about a singer in the 1950s to Beatlemania to a final verse about how he first heard the news that John had been killed. From Paul Simon’s worst-selling album up to that point. The Phillip Glass ending instrumental for strings, clarinet, and flute is painful mournful.
Here’s the original acoustic demo

V is for Vermont

Pickleball is a sport easier to play than to explain.

All of my wife’s immediate family – her parents, her two brothers, their wives, the three daughters amongst them, and our nuclear threesome – spent several days together just before Labor Day at Smugglers’ Notch Resort near remote Jeffersonsville, VT about 40 miles northeast of Burlington. It’s a ski resort in the winter but has grown into a family-friendly summer resort.

Smugglers’ Notch namesake “comes from the smugglers of the early nineteenth century, who used the thick forest on the mountain range, and the caves and caverns along the Long Trail to transport illegal or embargoed goods across the Canadian border. The notch was most likely involved in bootlegging during the Prohibition-era of the 1920s, using the same caves as a cache for smuggled Canadian beer, wine, and spirits.”

We got there on a Sunday, the day before they switched to a modified fall schedule of events. The downside is that there was much confusion about the new rotation. For instance – and there were five or six examples like this – the Wife and I call up to book disc golf lessons at the appointed time, but no one there knows what we’re talking about.

The good news is the staff, to a person, was unfailingly polite and accommodating. An employee made a call and got us transportation to a location on the massive site, and a guy gave us – and only us, as it turned out – lessons.

Disc golf, BTW, is a flying disc game – think of series of differently-weighted Frisbees – the object which, similar to golf, “is to traverse a course from beginning to end in the fewest number of throws of the disc.” As it turns out, there are a few disc golf courses in our area, notably Central Park in Schenectady.

More crowded was the pickleball class, a sport easier to play than to explain. A standard pickleball court is the same size as a doubles badminton court, but we played in a modified tennis court. The net height is a yard, a little less than a meter. The paddle is smaller than a tennis racquet but larger than a ping-pong paddle, and more like the latter. The ball itself is like a wiffleball but smaller in diameter, and slightly heavier. It plays like a mixture of tennis and badminton.

The five days there also featured hikes, some reading, and, on two nights, visits to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It is a lovely setting. As someone almost said, a splendid time was had by all.

ABC Wednesday – Round 17