So, I read an article about the new AC/DC album in the Wall Street Journal today.
There’s no punchline. Because there’s actually an article about Mr. Young and company.
It Sounds Like The Setup Of A Joke
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Category: Music
A Venn Diagram For Perplexed Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Staffers
Story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Ted Nugent calls Wisconsin critics “unclean vermin,” but Oshkosh show still sells well:
The Detroit-born rock star encountered bad concert karma this week. A Native American tribe in Idaho canceled an August show he planned at its casino, citing his “racist and hate-filled remarks” as cause for concern. Soon afterward, a Washington casino followed suit, canceling two August shows for the same reason.
But Nugent’s Saturday show at Oshkosh’s Leach Amphitheater is still on and selling well — even though the performer, 65, had some choice words for his critics here.
In an interview with the Appleton Post Crescent, Nugent said Wisconsinites who are upset by him are “unclean vermin,” calling it “a badge of honor” to know that some people had problems with his Badger State visit.
He went on: “By all indicators, I don’t think [the critics] actually qualify as people.”
Nugent, 65, was reacting to the online uproar caused by a letter published in the Post Crescent by an Oshkosh resident that called for the show at the Waterfest Concert Series to be canceled, criticizing what the writer called “outlandish behavior and threatening statements that border on the obscene to the bizarre.”
So.
To recap:
- Ted Nugent does as Ted Nugent is.
- Some of his concerts were cancelled elsewhere.
- Someone in a letter to the editor to an Oshkosh newspaper complaining that Ted Nugent Thinks Bad Thoughts And Should Be An Unperson.
- Ted Nugent does as Ted Nugent is.
- People who think Ted Nugent’s concerts should not be allowed did not buy tickets to Ted Nugent’s concert.
- People who are aware of Ted Nugent when he is not part of the Approved Current Two Minute Hate, that is, his fans, bought tickets to the non-cancelled concert.
- Perplexion!
Sorry, that’s a chain of thought, which might be a bit much for journalists. Here, I have produced a Venn diagram of the situation as Venn diagrams are very popular on Web sites that feature lists of pictures instead of flowing logical thought:
In a stunning turn of events, people who wanted to see Ted Nugent and know Ted Nugent did not boycott Ted Nugent at the behest of a letter to the editor.
Ted Nugent is conservative and outspoken. One would say extreme, but one who said that does not know the word hyperbolic. That is what Ted Nugent does.
What sorts of headlines did we see when the Dixie Chicks went off on the president of this country abroad during a time of war? “Dixie Chicks Mock President, and Commercial Appeal Evaporates”? No, see saw things like, “After Speaking Truth To Power, Dixie Chicks Release New Album”. Which did not sell, because the appropriate headline should have been “Dixie Chicks Offend Their Audience, Appeal To People Who Do Not Buy Dixie Chicks Albums”. The Journal-Sentinel headline would read “Dixie Chicks Express Right Sentiments, But Concert Sales Flag”.
It’s not even a matter of who’s right or wrong politically here; Ted Nugent played to type, and the Dixie Chicks did not. He said something characteristic to Ted Nugent, and Ted Nugent fans accepted it.
The perplexion comes in because journalists think what Ted Nugent said is wrong, and that the mere power of a letter to the editor should have illumined that to backwards classic rock fans and hunters in outstate Wisconsin. The unspoken follow-up, perhaps, is, “Gawd, people in the state where I live and work are soooo dumb! I wish I could get a job in Austin or Boston.” I suspect it’s there anyway.
(Full disclosure: I’m a lightweight fan of Ted Nugent, having bought a greatest hits collection of his on cassette way back when one bought greatest hits collections from record clubs one saw advertised in magazines. I also, when attending the university, was tasked with writing a myth for my Mythology class, and my shaggy long-haired nineteen-year-old self wrote about the invention of rock and roll where Prometheus “gives” an electrified six-stringed lute to a boy in Detroit, and the teacher asked me to read the myth to the whole seventy kids in the auditorium-sized class.)
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A Paean To Personal Relics
Dierks Bentley talks about holding on.
I try to explain this to my beautiful wife whenever she gets into a decluttering mood about how I keep many of these things because they remind me of too many people who aren’t around to remind me of themselves.
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That Frank Sinatra Album That Looks Like The Die Hard Poster
If someone ever refers to the Frank Sinatra Album that looks like the poster for the movie Die Hard, you know they’re talking about Only the Lonely:
See?
Of course, if someone says, “That Frank Sinatra album where he’s singing songs about getting older and being lonely,” you’re not going to nail it down that quickly because that could mean any number of them.
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Are You A Psychopath? Take This Quiz And Find Out!
Listen to this song:
I’m obviously a psycho, because when I hear this song, I have an allergic reaction: My eyes start to water and my throat closes off a bit.
When this song came out in 2004, it was about me and my father. You’ve not heard much about him on this blog because after my parents divorced in the early 1980s, my mother got custody and moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis, so I didn’t see my father but for a couple weeks in the summer. Eventually, I did return to Milwaukee for school and lived in his basement, but after that, when I moved back to St. Louis again, our relationship was a little strained. Perhaps he felt a little betrayed that I didn’t stay in Wisconsin. At any rate, he died a year and a couple months later.
So when this song came out, I missed him and acutely wondered what he would think of me as a man.
But, now, ten years later, the song is doubly potent because not only do I think about how I miss my father, but how much my boys will miss me. I know it, and they won’t until they do.
(If you want further confirmation of whether you’re a psychopath, you can take this quiz linked by neo-neocon to find out. In running down your list of favorite bloggers, gentle reader, you’re bound to surmise I’m not really a psycopath because I can’t actually affect concern for other people effectively.)
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St. Louis Presumes Too Much
The city of St. Louis is about to hand the keys of its kingdom to some out-of-town company promising to make St. Louis just like a Real City by having music festivals, and some writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dares, DARES compare the music festivals to be named later to Summerfest in Milwaukee.
Friends, Summerfest in Milwaukee is the best music festival in the known inhabited planets of the galaxy. It has twelve hours of music daily for ten days in the summer, and it has, what, ten? A dozen? stages with acts running almost constantly from local bands in the early afternoon to regional bands in the early evening to a national act headlining each stage at night. And there’s a major national act at the Marcus Ampitheatre with attendant opening acts every evening.
How dare does a St. Louisian compare anything St. Louis and its out-of-state lackeys can produce to Summerfest?
Brothers and sisters, here is a potential list of national acts likely to play Summerfest this year.
Note that this list comprises the headline acts for the ground stages at the musical festival. Not the major acts booked to the Marcus Ampitheatre.
QED.
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They’re Gonna Take My Fedora For This, But….
Any song that Frank Sinatra did that Eydie Gorme also covered, Eydie Gorme did it better.
Continue reading “They’re Gonna Take My Fedora For This, But….”
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A Well-Kept Pet
Undoubtedly, Charles has already seen this, but you might not have: Bob Greene, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, has a bit about Petula Clark in the Wall Street Journal:
Last year she released an album called “Lost in You” with a song, “Cut Copy Me,” that Time magazine deemed one of the 10 best of 2013. As remarkable as her life has been—she was Fred Astaire’s last big-screen dance partner (“Finian’s Rainbow,” 1968), she co-starred opposite Peter O’Toole (“Goodbye, Mr. Chips, ” 1969)—the girl who sang in solitude in the Welsh mountains remains. “We all build up our facade,” she says. “But the 5-year-old, she’s still there.”
You might know, gentle reader, that I continue to be impressed with the number of the 1960s people who continue to put out quality music outside the mainstream awareness.
Full disclosure: I own two Petula Clark LPs.
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The Loss of Allusion in Heavy Metal
Kids these days, wot?
Back in my day, heavy metal music was much smarter. Its songs covered Romantic poetry:
Alluded to middle English plays:
Sure, it’s just Romeo and Juliet, but Ratt knew who they were.
Or at the very least retold the stories found in the works of respected elder horror writers.
You know, as though the songwriters had read a book or something.
I’ve sampled some recent hard rock and heavy metal, and I don’t see a similar literary bent to it. What am I missing?
Or has it in fact dumbed down with the rest of our culture now that the classics aren’t even nodded at in contemporary education?
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Why Daddy Says It That Way
So one of the boys brought this book home from the library:
Daddy pronounces it Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark versus Train.
Because of the 1970s. Which explains a lot of Daddy, actually.
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20 Years Later, I Suppose It Makes Sense To Be Confused
So I heard “One of Us” on the radio, the 1995 hit from Joan Osborne, and I immediately had a mental image of a nose ring linked to an earring and hair that was spiked tall on top and long braids down.
Does that look like Joan Osborne to you? Take a look.
Then I remembered, no, you old fool, you’re thinking of Jane Child who looks like that.
You can see why I would be confused briefly:
- I’m an old man.
- Joan/Jane
- One major hit each.
- Nose rings.
And to be honest, I don’t really like either of the songs. But I didn’t change the station when it came on. “Don’t Want To Fall In Love”, on the other hand, isn’t getting a lot of radio play 23 years later. “One of Us” isn’t, either, except for the silly “We’re playing our complete playlist in alphabetical order!” thing that one of the radio stations is currently running.
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From a Distance, That Makes No Sense
It was the 1980s: when we were close to them, we couldn’t see the senselessness.
We can’t go on just running away.
If we stay any longer, we will surely never get away.
Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s a direct contradiction of a density to warp time and space.
Also, children, the rumors were true: 1980s architecture did feature doors made taller specifically to accommodate teased hair.
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How Long Have I Lived In The Country? A Metric.
You know how long I have lived in the country these days? Well, long enough that the suburbs are encroaching upon me and I’m not liking it. But that does not truly measure the distance I’ve come in my nearly four (!) years at Nogglestead.
Instead, a truer yardstick is the evolution in my thought about the Gretchen Wilson song “Redneck Woman”.
When the song came out, I lived in St. Louis, and Gretchen Wilson is from Pocahantas, Illinois, which is close enough to St. Louis that the St. Louis area–not just the country and western radio stations–claims her as one of her own. So she got a lot of radio play when her first album came out in 2004.
I don’t know why it annoyed me. Maybe it reminded me too much of my semi-youth in the trailer park and down the gravel road in Jefferson County.
At any rate, fast forward nine years and four years’ worth of hearing the coyotes come out at night and go home in the morning, and when I’m bouncing my pickup truck down the rolling farm roads and when my country station of choice in the Springfield area has the song in heavy rotation, and I don’t change the station.
The fresh country air has changed me, maybe.
Also, Gretchen Wilson’s Wikipedia entry (WARNING: looking up Gretchen Wilson on Wikipedia puts you on some government watchlist or another, I suspect), her big break came when she was hired to sing twice nightly in a bar in Springfield, Missouri. Whoa. Man, I hope that comes up at trivia night.
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I Had Just Discovered Eydie Gorme
Popular singer Eydie Gorme dies at 84:
Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.
I bought Blame It On The Bossa Nova recently; I got it on vinyl at either the spring Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library or at the local antique mall. We’ve listened to it a number of times, including her biggest solo hit:
I just last week got one of her Spanish titles on CD, Canta en Español.
What a wonderful voice, silenced. Rest peacefully.
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Topical Music
First, the song “Fistfight in the Waffle House”:
Now, the story: Waffle House Armed Robber Gets the Surprise of a Lifetime When Customer Decides to Fight Back With a Gun:
An Atlanta crook picked the wrong Waffle House to target early Monday morning. That’s because when the bandana and hoodie-wearing bandit walked into the restaurant and pointed a gun at patrons, one of them reached for his gun and fired back.
Brothers and sisters, that is D.U.M. dumb. It’s a scientific fact that there are more guns in your Georgia Waffle House at any time of day or night than at your local Friends of the NRA meeting.
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VodkaPundit Channels QAHY
VodkaPundit’s Friday Night Video is last week’s QA Music: "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen.
Steve says:
I first become aware of this song — and Leonard Cohen — in the 1990 Christian Slater vehicle, Pump Up the Volume.
. . . .
It’s impossible to convey my disappointment that long-ago summer when I picked up the soundtrack, only to find it featured an inferior Concrete Blonde cover of “Everybody Knows.”
As I alluded to in my book report on Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems 1956-1968, actually discovering who sang the version that appeared in the movie throughout except for the scene in the Jeep. In those days before the Internet, if you heard a song but not the artist, it could take aeons before you tracked it down. It took me years of radio listening to catch onto who sang “Baker Street” (Gerry Rafferty) or “Hungry Heart” (Bruce Springsteen). You could ask around, but my cohort at the time didn’t listen to older music. I suppose I could have called the radio station, but it was never that pressing.
At any rate, once I associated Leonard Cohen’s name with the song (Was it in the closing credits? Was it an article about the film? I forget), I went right up to Camelot Music to get a cassette version of I’m Your Man. I’ve since replaced the cassette with a CD and ripped it into iTunes, which explains why I was listening to it just a couple of weeks ago.
Here’s the version I put on the other blog, which has scenes from the film:
Also, there’s no telling yet what Mr. Green thinks of Meco. If he thinks of Meco.
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People You Did Not Know Were Swedish
Neneh Mariann Cherry (born Neneh Mariann Karlsson; 10 March 1964) is a Swedish singer-songwriter, rapper, and occasional DJ and broadcaster.
The Swedes are behind much more than we’re aware of. Connect the dots, man.
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The Internet Has Let Me Down Again
What, no mash-up combining a Trix children’s cereal commercial:
With the Paul Revere and the Raiders hit “Kicks”:
Jeez, people, do I have to think of everything?
Also, catalog this as another instance of That Thing That Daddy Sings:
(Silly rabbit)
Trix just keep gettin’ harder to get,
And all your tricks ain’t bringin’ you bowls of it.
Before you find out it’s too late, boy,
You better get straight.
I sincerely hope you got that stuck in your head, gentle reader, because my children will need more people to fill out a support group.
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An Answer To An Unasked Trivia Question
What is Herb Alpert’s favorite glass?
One might respond a glass of Tequila, but no:
This advertisement is from 1993, and, forgive me, I associate Herb Alpert with the 1960s and maybe the 1970s because of his prevalence on LPs. Most of my Herb Alpert LPs are from the early years (The Lonely Bull, Going Places, What Now My Love, S.R.O., Sounds Like, and Warm means I own most of his 1960s catalog and nothing after), so you can understand why I am sometimes taken aback when I realize he has continued releasing albums even to this day.
Which is why in 1993, he would still be a relevant pitchman, although I would have expected to see him selling Reddi-Wip.
Libbey, his favorite glass, is also still still in business, although its magazine advertising campaigns seem to have fallen off.
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I’ve Seen Direct to Cable Movies That Start Like That
So we visited a church garage sale at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church in Springfield on Saturday. It was bag day, and that’s like catnip to me. I rub my cheeks and roll on the junk you can buy, especially late in the day on bag day.
No, this isn’t a Good Book Hunting post, as I only bought three books (X-Men, the novelization of the film; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf; An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy; and The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner)–and who wants to see a photograph of just four books?
Instead, I bought a bunch of things for craft work to add to the backlog of other craft things accumulating since I’ve moved away from doing anything at my workbench but have yet to alter my acquisition of things to do at my workbench. I also bought a stack of videocassettes to join the hundreds of other films that I’ve not watched since buying them at garage sales and book fairs.
But that’s neither here nor there. I did make one purchase that sounds like it could be the plot of a cheap slasher film.
I picked up this CD because its title and text were complete in German:
I expected either heavy metal or some heavy gospel of some sort (given I bought it at a church garage sale.
When I got home, I cracked it open, and I saw:
Well, then I hoped it was not gospel of a dark and disturbing sort.
Given the font on the cover, I was just going to trust iTunes’s music database to fill that all in, so I popped it in to import, and iTunes could not find it on the Internet.
You see how this could be the beginning of a cheap horror franchise of which I would be only a small part? A Daemonic CD from a twisted Catholic church that unleashes unearthly forces when played or on the Internet when imported into iTunes?
So I looked more closely and did an Internet search, and the album is Kveldssanger by Ulver, a Norwegian black metal band who changed it up with this, their second album. It sounds folky and, instead of metal screaming vocals, some neo-chanting.
Which really doesn’t detract from the whole strange dark CD invokes dark forces motif.
Note that I bought this CD on the week where I posted this. Life has a way of connecting dots for us. Well, all right, our minds do, or at least mine tends to move in strange directions that seem to be patternic.
And, if you’re wondering, it’s the first of the two CDs I bought this weekend. The second? The Best of Barry White. Which goes to again prove I am eclectic.
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