Tag: music

30-Day Challenge: Day 23- Favorite Music Video

Let’s face it: JRC’s Hurt is a bit of a downer.

Another difficult question. Probably from Year 2 through year Six, I watched MTV a LOT. Watched the video countdown almost every week, then not so much. I should note that, for the body of video work, I’d probably pick Billy Joel.

There are probably only three post-1995 videos I both saw and liked enough to even consider. Hey Ya by Outkast (and here’s a longer, though not better version) and I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow by the Foggy Mountain Boys are two of them.

Plenty of good picks in this list of best videos and in this one, although many of the actual videos have been disabled. Two on those lists that I was quite fond of were Once In a Lifetime by the Talking Heads and Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel. I was an irrationally big fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s Smells Like Nirvana.

If I had to pick one video, it would probably be Hurt by John R. Cash, which I watched over and over. But let’s face it, it’s a bit of a downer. So I don’t know that it’s my favorite, but one I watched a great deal in the day: Would I Lie to You by Eurythmics; I’m especially fond of the ferocity of Annie Lennox and the brass.

Monday Monday; no, wrong Mamas & Papas song

I’m listening to the Coverville podcast a few months ago, as I usually do a couple of times a week. Brian was doing the Mondegreen episode, a term that, if I had heard it, I had forgotten. The definition, which I stole from somewhere: “Misheard lyrics (also called mondegreens) occur when people misunderstand the lyrics in a song. These are NOT intentional rephrasing of lyrics, which is called parody.” There are whole websites devoted to this issue.

The last song on the show, not only had I gotten wrong for years, but have SUNG it incorrectly when performing with my sister.

The correct lyric is:

stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I got down on my knees
and I pretend to pray

Yet all these years, I had been hearing:
and I began to pray

To be fair to me, many other people of my vintage heard it the same way. I know this because I asked a number of them. And it is noted as a common error in Kiss This Guy, named after a misheard line from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”

I never misheard that Hendrix lyric or this line from California Dreamin’ offered up by Am I Right?
Misheard Lyrics:
You know you’re preaching like the Pope.
Original Lyrics:
You know the preacher likes the cold.

But the one I DID mishear I’ve thought about a number of times since. Seems that the fact that the verse has three verbs in the past tense (stopped, passed, got) tunes the ear for a fourth (began) rather than a present tense verb such as pretend. They COULD have sung “pretended” and I don’t think it ruins the scansion. Here are the complete lyrics.

BTW, what linguistic tool is being used when you speak in the present tense about things that happened in the past? “So I go to the store. I see an item I want. I buy it.” Past action, but present tense verbs.


Anyway, HERE is a version of the hit song that only went to #4 in the US charts in 1966 by the Mamas and the Papas, and HERE is another. The song is attributed to John Phillips and Michelle Gilliam.

John eventually married and divorced Michelle. John performed this version on his album Phillips 66, which was released posthumously in 2001; he would have been 75 today. Michelle Phillips is the remaining survivor of the Mamas and the Papas.

What lyrics have YOU misheard, and how did you finally figure it out?

TV Theme Song QUESTIONS

Then there’s the special cases of themes that are best known for whistling or finger snapping.

Ken Levine was ranting about the loss of the television theme song, about which I tend to agree. It so happened that as I was reading his piece, I was in the midst of listening to one of seven or eight CDs I have of TV theme songs. I was at work, so I didn’t have time to look to see what songs were playing. A number of songs I liked but couldn’t place.

This brings me to these questions, in honor of the Emmys this week:

1. What are your favorite TV theme songs?

I’m partial to the work of Mike Post and the late Earle Hagen.

2. What do you think are the most recognizable? I’m thinking that you could be listening to a bunch of soundtrack songs and instantly recognize the tune out of context. Perhaps one has to separate the instrumentals from the songs with lyrics. I think there have been some great, distinctive themes for shows that were once popular but aren’t seen that often anymore, as far as I know, such as Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Taxi, and Barney Miller. Other shows seem to be in reruns forever. My guess, in more or less reverse order:

The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson – perhaps beginning to fade from memory, but those infomercials for the best of Carson are around. And it was on for 30 years.
Sanford & Son – that great Quincy Jones tune
Peter Gunn – was a big pop hit, and was covered by the Blues Brothers
MAS*H – very popular show, still in reruns
Law & Order – a 20-year show, just off the air, its spinoffs still on the air using variations on the theme, and it’s constantly on reruns
Hawaii 5-0 – another pop hit that shows up at sporting events, and now is going to be remade for a new series in the 2010 TV season on CBS

The ones with words are tougher, but I imagine Friends, Cheers, Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Jeffersons and The Brady Bunch would be among them.

Then there are the special cases of themes that are best known for whistling (The Andy Griffith Show (here’s The Andy Griffith Show, really) or finger-snapping (The Addams Family).

What are your favorites, and which ones were most distinctive?
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Paste magazine’s 20 Best TV Theme Songs of All Time.

 

Eric Carmen and the Young Rascals?

There IS a Raspberries/Rascals link.

I was listening to one of my two favorite podcasters this week – yes, Arthur, you’re the other one – and he was giving the rock birthdays for August 11. He said, “1949, Eric Carmen, singer for The Young Rascals, The Raspberries, and a solo career.”

I’m not a big Eric Carmen fan, and I own none of his music. It’s not that I object to his songs such as the Raspberries’ Go All The Way or his All By Myself, where he nicks Rachmaninoff; it just didn’t reach the level of purchasing them.

Conversely, I own a LOT of the Young Rascals, who later became the Rascals. They had Top 10 hits such as Good Lovin’, Groovin’, A Girl Like You, How Can I Be Sure, A Beautiful Morning, and People Got To Be Free. At the moment the Beatles broke up, the Rascals were arguably my favorite active band. I have (present tense) at least eight of their albums on vinyl. And as an inveterate reader of liner notes, I had NO recollection of Eric Carmen with the Rascals.

So I checked with the podcaster, who pointed to the This Day In Music website that he always checks. The same info shows up in other sites, citing TDIM. But there is no evidence that this is actually true on any site dedicated to either artist or in any of my music reference books. So how did this mistake get made?

My theories abound:

1) The groups are alphabetically close. Perhaps the information about Carmen and the Raspberries got duplicated in the Rascals info in some database.

2) The stories about the namings of the groups are remarkably similar. According to this site, and confirmed elsewhere, the character Froggy in the Our Gang/Little Rascals comedies of the early 1920s, which later appeared on television, would often say, “Oh, raspberries!” Eric Carmen said it as a joke in a discussion about picking the band’s name, but the others thought it was the right selection. The Young Rascals also were named for the Little Rascals.

3) There IS a Raspberries/Rascals link. “The band Fotomaker was formed in 1978 by bassist Gene Cornish and drummer Dino Danelli, former members of the seminal 1960s power-pop group The Rascals (a/k/a “The Young Rascals”). Rounding out the group was guitarist Wally Bryson, formerly of power-pop hitmakers The Raspberries (which featured singer Eric Carmen)…”

Goodness knows one cannot “correct the Internet”, but in this narrow case, I’m compelled to try. Or if I’ve gotten it wrong, I’d like some proof.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Kids Are All Right

Metroland critic Laura Leon: “These are the kind of real-life stories that everybody deals with…”


After my wife and I had our almost weekly summer date and saw the movie The Kids Are All Right, she noted that it was, in many ways, a very conventional, slice-of-life, film about the travails of family life. And I realized, that, at the core, she was absolutely right.

It’s a story about a long-time committed couple. They deal with the universal rigors of relationship, which was described as a marathon, not a sprint. It also involves their teenage kids, a girl just turning 18, and a boy, 15, dealing with sexuality, bullying, alcohol, and identity, just like many people.

OK, so not every movie involves a lesbian couple who were each artificially inseminated by an anonymous donor, who becomes less than anonymous when the boy gets the girl to find out who their common father is. And gay men’s porn is not always a family talking point.

What makes this an intriguing story was the script and direction of Lisa Cholodenko, creator of High Art and Laurel Canyon. Like those two films, as film critic Mick LaSalle noted, features “somebody from a world a little less structured who seduces someone from a world a little more regimented.”

The film is also blessed by the casting of Annette Bening, as a Type A doctor, and Julianne Moore, as her more bohemian partner. Their “unexotic, unglamorous and totally routine” lives are upended by the bio-dad (Mark Ruffalo); how (and why) he changes the family dynamic is an important part of the tale. A few critics carped that, in the end, conventionality, of a sort, is restored, but I think that’s the point.

If you’re looking for non-stop, wall-to-wall action, do not see this film. But if you want to see an interesting look at basic truths of family dynamics, check this out. As Metroland critic Laura Leon put it: “It’s kind of ironic that, finally, a movie about how long-term relationships change and transform over time—in short, what happens to just about everybody—has come out and it’s very wonderful…these are the kind of real-life stories that everybody deals with, and why aren’t we seeing more of them, instead of Clash of the Cyborg Mutants in 3D, in cinemas?”

The movie trailer.
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The only downside to the movie: no music by the Who.

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