Conway Twitty, far and away, the biggest horndog country music ever produced. This one is borderline sex offender registry material. But great song, and killer pompadour. Bonus points for the awesome vocal “bum-bum-bums”, and workin’ that salmon leisure suit with white shoes.
My heroes, at age 13
It hasn’t been a good week for my adolescent self. Here’s the story, btw, about why homes and schools in the vicinity of Dolphins Stadium are receiving “sex offender advisory” postcards warning them to be on the lookout for Who guitarist Pete Townshend.
Best Beatles song/video by a group other than the Beatles….
And the winner is… the Concretes.
Kate McGarrigle’s family remembers her
These tributes from Kate’s children, Rufus and Martha, and her sister and musical partner Anna were frank, touching and funny.
Rufus:
She was a magical woman, one foot in another world, a great songwriter, performer and bohemian, and she was surrounded, as she was dying, by family and friends. My father was there. Emmylou Harris was there. We sang to her as she lay there, in fact that certainly might have made her go that little bit faster.
As we were having this jamboree, her breathing became more laboured and she made a moaning noise. One of the nurses said this could go on for four days and we had already exhausted the back catalogue! Then Kate breathed a little differently, it was like she was saying, “Hold on, I’m going to end this show” and she died. I was looking right into her face, her eyes were open, and my aunt Jane was holding her hand. It was an amazing experience.
Anna:
I’m very shaken from losing my sister and closest friend, although last week we had a little spat. She loved fresh fruit and we had bought her some grapes, which I called “those little sacks of fluid”. Maybe it’s the way I said it, because she snapped at me: “Why do you always see the bad in things?” Maybe she associated it with the state of her lungs. I lost it, we had words, and I left and then apologised the next day. It was all fine again.
… Kate was one of the finest songwriters: her soul told her hands what to do. The song she wrote for Martha, which she performed at the Albert Hall, Proserpina, makes me cry. It’s amazing. For me, she’ll always be a contradiction: the widely read sophisticate who loved mixing with the high-end crowd with Rufus, and the rustic character, never happier than when riding an old bike, or cross-country skiing or knitting Scandinavian sweaters.
More tributes at the Montreal Gazette. And here is that final, moving performance of “Proserpina“:
Kate McGarrigle “departs in a haze of song and love”
So sad. This one hurts, and I’ve only ever seen Kate McGarrigle in concert once, with her sister of course, and daughter Martha and Emmylou Harris, who flew from Nashville to New York just for that show. It was an intimate and ever so tuneful evening (actually, afternoon), with much wry banter. I felt like I had been invited into the parlor of an eccentric, funny family of musical geniuses (which they were). Kate was just 63.
The mcgarrigles.com site has this simple announcement:
Sadly our sweet Kate had to leave us last night. She departed in a haze of song and love surrounded by family and good friends. She is irreplaceable and we are broken-hearted. Til we meet again dear sister. ♡
The CBC has an excellent retrospective here with numerous video clips, including two from her final appearance at the Royal Albert Hall last year:
The descriptors “Canadian icon” and “national treasure” are often used as lazy shorthand to refer to those artists who’ve made some sort of impact on our country’s music scene. But Kate McGarrigle was one of the awe-inspiring few who truly deserved those epithets — and then some. McGarrigle, who passed away Monday after a drawn-out battle with clear cell sarcoma (she was diagnosed with the rare form of cancer in 2006), was one of Canada’s legendary voices, a woman who celebrated and elevated the rich history of our country’s musical traditions throughout a career that spanned more than three decades.
Vanity Fair has Songs in the Key of Lacerating, a lengthy piece on the many twists and turns of the McGarrigle/Wainwright family saga.
And there is this priceless mockumentary by Rufus and Martha about their mothers’ scheme for world domination via folk music.
Way too soon. What a tragedy, but departing in a haze of song and love surrounded by family and good friends. That’s a good thing. We should all be so lucky when the time comes.
RIP Carl Smith, honky tonk hero
RIP Carl Smith, who died Saturday. He wore nice suits, had a killer smile and a gravity-defying pompadour. He played with a first-rate backing band, and his songs had more than a little swagger, sometimes even a smidgen of sleaze. His tuneful voice, in the nasal Hank Williams tradition, could cut through the smoke and noise of any honky-tonk.
He-eey-ey Joe — Come On Let’s Be Buddy Duddies
Show Me You’re My Palsie Walsie
Introduce That Pretty Little Chick To Me
Hey Joe — Quit That Waitin’ Hesitatin’
Let Me At Her What’s The Matter
You’re As Slow As Any Joe Can Be
The Essential Carl Smith would be a perfect choice for a long drive across a flat state, and should feature prominently on the jukebox in the dive bar in heaven.
He was a dude, and he abides.
more about “Carl Smith – 1960’s – Hey Joe“, posted with vodpod
Lady GaGa: “Disco Sucks” redux?
The official video for Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” (Alexander McQueen! Haus of GaGa!) is best viewed side-by-side with this inspired fan parody (Snuggies! WalMart bags!). Click here to do just that.
I find the strong reactions Lady GaGa inspires more interesting than her actual music and videos. (I do like some of her songs, but if I’m in the mood for dance pop, I’ll listen to Goldfrapp or the Norwegian singer/DJ Annie.)
Not many are neutral about Lady GaGa. Her fans adore her, and there are a whole bunch of them, but she also really really really gets up the nose of others, including, predictably, Bill O’Reilly and the always entertaining Westboro Baptist Church, who has singled her out as having a “whore’s forehead” (it’s some nonsense from the Bible, apparently).
There are precursors to this. You could go all the way back to Elvis, I suppose, but I prefer to arbitrarily start with the loathing Madonna inspired from mainstream media when she first appeared on the scene, and especially (this really dates me) the Disco Sucks promotion night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979.
Don’t remember that one? Here’s an account via the Independent
The precise time and place was 12 July 1979 at Comiskey Park, Chicago, at an event overseen by W-LUP DJ Steve Dahl, under the banner “Disco demolition”. In the intermission of a baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the White Sox, a huge pile of disco records was covered in lighter fluid and then set ablaze. Anyone who brought disco records to the game for burning was allowed in for a mere 98 cents. Dahl was an overweight, bespectacled shock-jock in military headwear who had himself actually hosted disco parties. But he saw an opportunity and sensed the backlash that was swarming around him. Live on television, the flames sparked a crowd-invasion, the field ended up trashed, and the White Sox were forced to forfeit their second game. The event made the international news.
It was the end of an 18-month campaign that had been brewing across Middle America in order to contain the music that had so caught the popular consciousness. That it was picked up by the media with such enthusiasm demonstrates the latent hatred that had been festering. Disco was diametrically opposite to the macho posturing of white rock – and since there were no bands in disco, no tours, or souvenir T-shirts, it was difficult to quantify. A few journalists wrote passionately about it, but in the main it was ignored or treated with disdain. As Craig Werner writes in A Change Is Gonna Come, “The Anti-disco movement represented an unholy alliance of funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries. None the less, the attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia.”
Is this all a bit strong? Maybe. And I really can’t stand seeing those final three words strung together like that. It sounds like a paper written by a sophomore at a very expensive, mediocre private college. But I do agree that virulent anti-disco, anti-Madonna, anti-GaGa reactions (typically from “overweight, bespectacled” types) usually stand in for something deeper and nastier.
more about “YouTube Doubler Beta | Mashup Helper“, posted with vodpod
Namesake, with Muppets
Yuletide joy from Tom Waits
more about “Tom Waits – Chritmas Card From a Hook…“, posted with vodpod
Anxiety of influence
Truly a terrific scene from Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, Taylor Hackford’s amazing 1987 documentary. The master shows the student, better compensated by several orders of magnitude, who’s the boss. Priceless interaction. What can I say? I’m a fan of both of ’em.
more about “Agony of influence“, posted with vodpod