The home of the brave

The textbook year for divisiveness in America that’s always cited is 1968: Vietnam, race riots, the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and on and on. Here today, it’s only February yet 2026 is shaping up as possibly one of the most brutal and contentious in U.S. history.

The Super Bowl should be apolitical, but it seldom is and this year’s halftime entertainment has right-wingers jumping down a Bad Bunny-hole. Ironically, in 1968 another Puerto Rican-born singer pissed off a different generation of conservatives during a sporting event.

In 1968, Jose Feliciano’s jazzy, folky take on Light My Fire went to #3 nationally, winning him Grammies for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal and Best New Artist. Choosing Feliciano to sing the national anthem before the fifth game of the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals seemed like a safe bet.

Sitting on a stool in the infield with his guide dog lying next to him, Feliciano shed the bombast usually associated with the anthem, slowed it down and reshaped it much as he did with Light My Fire.

Conservatism in 1968 meant you were likely a member of the “silent majority,” took a hawkish view of Vietnam and, according to public opinion polls “found the antiwar movement, particularly its radical and ‘hippie’ elements, more obnoxious than the war itself.” Chances are, if you were male you served in the military at some point. 

So with that mindset, here’s this singer with long hair, who doesn’t even have the decency to remove his sunglasses and with a foreign name fooling around with the national anthem. People freaked out and without the instant, anonymous feedback of social media, there were angry calls to NBC and letters to the editor for weeks afterwards. One example: “I have never heard anything so disgraceful or disrespectful.”

“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said in 2018. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”

Earlier in the series, the anthem was sung, predictably and colorlessly, by 1950s pop singer Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye, whose version is straightforward (at a time when Berry Gordy was looking to move his Motown acts deeper into the world of white entertainment and before Marvin’s soul got psychedelicized). “I was very disappointed that Gaye didn’t do his own thing,” said Feliciano later. “Gaye chose to follow the old, safe path. He had a wonderful opportunity to say something for his people.”

Gaye made up for it in 1983 before the NBA All-Star Game with a version that, just as Feliciano did reshaping the anthem in the same manner that he reinterpreted Light My Fire, turned The Star-Spangled Banner into Sexual Healing.

Released as a single, Feliciano’s version of the anthem went to #50. He's also performed it at naturalization ceremonies welcoming new immigrants to America.

Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and knuckleheads.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy was an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

New Jersey lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.

"The war is over"

Fifty-three years tonight I attended my first “real” rock concert, Neil Young at Madison Square Garden. I’d been to two Rock and Roll Revival shows but I don’t count them as authentic rock experiences – seeing legendary elders Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley was exciting, but at that point they were essentially oldies acts.

The logistics around Young’s 1973 tour are amazing in retrospect. Today, major tours tend to occur in the summer or fall when travel is easy. For this tour, Young played 61 shows between the first week of January and the first week of April, with nearly all the January concerts played in cold weather cities. And some strange bookings. Two shows in Alabama – Tuscaloosa and Mobile – maybe because the song Alabama was on his last album, Harvest? Shows in Roanoke, Virginia, and Des Moines, Iowa. Overall, a promoter’s dream and a performer’s nightmare.

Not my ticket

The unannounced opening act that night at the Garden was Linda Ronstadt, her first time opening the tour and, after years of playing clubs like the Bitter End in New York City and the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the largest audience she’d ever faced. “She didn’t really want to do it,” said her manager. “She was scared.”

Throughout the Young shows she often played to indifferent crowds, but the shows served as a crucible of sorts and by September Ronstadt had her first gold album as her career took off (and overtook Neil Young possibly in popularity and certainly record sales).

There was no announcement when Ronstadt came on stage and I don’t recall her introducing herself or her band. Nerves, I guess. What I remember mostly was a lot of people milling around during her set looking for their seats, their friends or someone selling joints. And there were lots of joints. As soon as the lights came down for Young, the smell of marijuana was overwhelming; naïve me, it was my first experience being around it and reminiscent of the smell of chicken grilling outdoors, it only made me hungry.

Young played most of the stuff you'd want to hear, like Cinnamon Girl and Southern Man, but in the 1970s it was a badge of coolness and authenticity and honoring one's muse if artists insisted on spending a good part of their onstage time playing some newer stuff, so part of Young's setlist was dedicated to songs that wouldn't appear on record until Time Fades Away. But he also sang the obligatory Heart of Gold, a #1 hit a year ago, and Old Man so folks left the show happy.

This was also the night when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the Paris Peace Accord, officially ending U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. Someone came onstage and handed Young a note as he announced, “The war was over.” It was rumored that both sides were close to an expected agreement, but to hear the official word from Neil Young is a little cooler – and much more memorable – than getting it from Walter Cronkite.

Unbuttoned

Unlike the majority of the more than 1000 people who’ve posted their reviews on IMDB, I wasn’t a fan of Cameron Crowe’s 2009 film Almost Famous. If there are two descriptions that have me headed for the neatest exit, it’s romcom and dramedy. Almost Famous is both.

But Crowe’s 2025 memoir, The Uncool, is the richer and more rewarding backstory of how a dorky 15-year-old kid somehow talked his way into interviewing Greg Allman, David Bowie, Kris Kristofferson and getting published in Rolling Stone.

It’s fair to state that those three performers were given to mercurial ways and heavy drug use or drinking, all of which may have gone into their acceptance of young Crowe, but to his credit he possessed the right combination of balls, conviction and a charming naivete.

I understand because I wanted to be a sportswriter but lacked the boldness to pull it off.  

John Austin

I got off to a fast start in 8^th grade, interviewing a substitute teacher named John Austin who also played for the New Jersey Americans (the Americans eventually morphed into today’s Brooklyn Nets) for our school newspaper.

Austin, at six feet, was the first black basketball player to attend Boston College, where he averaged 27 points a game for three years, before playing briefly with the Baltimore Bullets and the minor league Scranton Miners.

I don’t remember what I asked him or how the final story shaped up; the life of a basketball gypsy in the late sixties would have made for a fascinating subject, but how would a 13-year-old know that?

What I recall from that day is that I wore a green sweater, double-breasted and trendy, but left unbuttoned. Middle school could be a factory of cruelty, full of guys who could barely read but paid close attention to everyone’s clothes. Pity the poor sucker who wore white socks with shoes or whose pants cuffs were too high. To my mind, leaving the sweater unbuttoned minimized the chances of drawing their attention, a personal cloak of invisibility.

But John Austin noticed and advised me to button the sweater, because it looked “cooler.” His words. I did, but by later that day it was unbuttoned again. 

More than a decade later, working for a regional entertainment newspaper looking to expand its coverage to sports, I found talking to high school football and basketball coaches a breeze, but entering the New York Giants’ locker room or batting practice at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia was like walking into a lion’s den. On my own, I froze up, afraid of being rejected, ridiculed or called out as a fraud.

It was as if I was wearing the green sweater, left unbuttoned, all over again.

I did speak with a few players but mostly built my stories around observation and overheard dialogue. It worked pretty well but sometimes felt a bit dishonest. I chalked my approach up to New Journalism and assembled a decent portfolio of published work that helped move me to the next level, corporate communications, a safe haven where I didn’t feel like an outsider peering through a clubhouse window.

With that, the green sweater finally went into a closet for good.

Dreaming of an Off-White Christmas: Blast of Silence

Off-White Christmas films exist when the sights and sounds of Christmas are woven into the plot, but the holiday is only peripheral to the story, a Christmas tree in the corner towering over the proceedings. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Lethal Weapon (1987) and The Silent Partner (1978) all fit the description as does Blast of Silence (1961).

In Blast of Silence, hitman Frankie Bono (Allen Baron, who also co-wrote the screenplay and directed) is contracted to knock off a secondary, but overly ambitious mob boss during the Christmas holiday. Bono’s work requires keeping a low profile, but a childhood friend recognizes him in a bar and invites Bono to a Christmas party, where he’s reunited with an old flame, Lorrie (Molly McCarthy). That’s when things start to go wrong.

He awkwardly tries to reignite his relationship with Lorrie and gets rejected. Bono buys a gun with a silencer from low-life Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), whom he eventually kills when Ralph realizes who the target is and tries to shake down Bono.

Maybe it’s just holiday disillusionment settling in from his brush with his past, but Frankie tries – unsuccessfully – to back out of the contract. Instead, he’s given a New Year’s Day deadline to get the job done.

Bono kills the target, goes to a dilapidated marshland dock to collect his money and now, because he tried to renege on the contract, has become a mob target, is killed.

Challenged by a minimal budget, Blast of Silence was shot in stark black and white on the streets of Manhattan without permits, offering a Cold War-era visual time capsule: Greenwich Village and Harlem, the Staten Island Ferry, Rockefeller Center decorated for Christmas. A seedy hotel with its sign welcoming “transients.” Independent, family-run stores selling books, hardware, shoes, records. Soda fountains. A billboard advertising Knickerbocker Beer. No corporate signage; not a McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts in sight. No boarded-up storefronts or graffiti. Vibrant and yet because it's a world long gone, heart-breaking.

Frankie Bono takes in Rockefeller Center

The film’s interiors are raw and authentic. Cramped apartments, a narrow jazz club, Ralphie’s slovenly basement room which he shares with caged white rats, barely lit stairwells.

Baron, still around today at age 97, was an aspiring comic book artist who drew several romance comics in the late forties before moving on to acting. His screenplay, co-written with the blacklisted Waldo Salt (credited here as Mel Davenport) includes growling narration by actor Lionel Stander, a cold, unforgiving inner voice rattling around Bono’s head: “You were born full of hate” and after he's been rejected by Lorrie, “Now that you got Christmas out of your system,” being two prime examples.

Given its noir overtones and New York City locale, Blast of Silence was a pioneer for the “grim and gritty” street dramas that came into vogue a decade later: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Serpico (1973) – both also written by Waldo Salt – The French Connection (1971) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), with shots of Frankie walking the streets, often in a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers and sightseers and, in one long continuous shot, walking the length of a city block at dawn toward the camera.

Strolling Manhattan at dawn

There’s also a long scene that’s as representative of noir as any: Frankie sitting on his hotel bed lovingly preparing his gun for the hit: oiling it, spinning the bullet chamber, taping the silencer to the barrel, all against the soundtrack of a melancholy trumpet solo, reminiscent of the main theme of Chinatown (1974).

If Blast of Silence was a true holiday flick, that scene would’ve been accompanied by Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow. For an Off-White Christmas, the solo trumpet works pretty well.

Detroit cool

For a couple of hours there, it looked like we lost Lem Barney.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the NFL Hall of Fame announced Barney’s death at age 80 and published an obituary, only to follow up a few hours later admitting that the news was unconfirmed, a false report.

Lem Barney, 1971

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1945, Barney was a standout at Jackson State University during a golden age of historically black colleges and universities football programs. Drafted by the Detroit Lions in 1967, his rookie season is still considered one of the best by a defensive back — 10 interceptions and the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award. Over his 11-year career, he totaled 56 interceptions, seven defensive touchdowns, seven Pro Bowls, and three All-Pro selections before entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.

(1967 was a big year for Barney. In the off-season he was married and also served six months of active duty in the Navy).

Barney was also a spectacular kick returner. His 61-yard punt return against Cincinnati in 1970, a display of cunning and confidence, should run on an endless loop in the Football Hall of Fame. A Cincinnati punt hits the ground in front of Barney as three Bengals close in. But they can’t locate the bouncing ball and during the confusion, Barney grabs it off the ground and outraces everyone for a touchdown.

Playing in Detroit had some advantages and in 1968, Barney and teammate Mel Farr became friends with Marvin Gaye, who lived in a toney Detroit suburb. The three bonded over sports and music, playing golf and shooting hoops.

Marvin

When songwriters Obie Benson and Al Cleveland shopped their very un-Motown song about the state of America circa 1970, Gaye agreed to sing What’s Going On but only if Barney and Farr sang background vocals.

They’d been in the studio before as Gaye’s guests, but they were now behind microphones contributing to the background singing and the soul-brother speak that fades in and out of the mix: ‘Hey, brother, what’s happening?! Solid! Right on!”

At a time when there was zero crossover between sports and popular music – these were the days when Anita Bryant and Al Hirt provided the halftime entertainment at Super Bowls – Barney and Farr became athletic avatars of cool.

Yet just as Barney and Farr were hanging their gold record plaques, Gaye had another request: he wanted to try out, at age 31 and with no experience, for the Lions.

He moved his Rolls Royce out of his garage, turned it into a gym and began an impressive training regimen, running 4-5 miles per day and lifting weights, bulking up nearly 30 pounds.

The Lions organization agreed to give Gaye a tryout; after all, this was the team that once allowed George Plimpton to attend training camp and play quarterback in a preseason game. Gaye looked good, but not good enough to be invited to camp.

Gaye would have one more brush with sports when he sang the national anthem before the 1983 NBA All-Star game, a remarkably cool performance of that awkwardly phrased “song” that had women in the audience swooning.

Barney would get another chance at show biz, starring as one of The Black Six (1974) a biker exploitation flick that included five other NFL bad asses.

Marvin Gaye died on April Fool’s Day, 1984, shot to death by his father. Barney and his wife attended Gaye’s funeral. Farr passed in 2015. As of today, Lem Barney is still alive and hopefully well.

The Compleat Beatles

Rather than sit through the epic that is the 2025 version of The Beatles Anthology, I caught The Compleat Beatles (1982) on the internet recently.

There was a time when The Compleat Beatles was considered the go-to documentary about the band, with lots of archival footage and interviews with Liverpool and Hamburg insiders who knew them when, several current musicians and, the real coup, George Martin.

Once readily available on VHS, Paul McCartney saw it as unauthorized competitor to Anthology and acquired its rights, removing it from circulation (although at one time it was a staple in the VHS bargain bits in department stores). Today, it mostly exists in bootleg copies or on online video sites.

Here are a few random thoughts and observations.

Ringo’s aspiration of someday getting into hairdressing takes on a new meaning in light of Spinal Tap. “I fancied (owning) a string of ladies hairdresser salons,” he says in archival footage, then imagines a possible conversation with a matronly client: “Hello, would you like a cup of tea, ma’am?” a flashback to Nigel Tufnel talking about a future working in a chapeau shop: “Yes, what size do you wear? We don’t have that size.”

Cigarettes are the band’s constant companions. Does Anthology include footage of the boys smoking? Considering George’s fate, it wouldn’t be surprising if not.

When the Beatles play the Coliseum in Washington D.C., how does the makeshift drum riser not collapse? It’s barely secured and it shakes and rattles each time Ringo hits the skins.

George Martin speaks with some candor about “desperately” trying to keep Revolution 9 off the White Album and commenting on Paul’s “relentless professionalism,” a loaded phrase if there ever was one.

Martin also has this terrific quote: “I think that the great thing about the Beatles was that they were of their time, their timing was right. They didn’t choose it – someone chose it for them. But the timing was right, and they left their mark in history because of it.”

And possibly because he made himself available to the documentarians, the script at one point says Martin “continued to lead them into new territory.” Maybe, maybe not.

The closed caption option on my television spelled out Phil Spector as Phil Specter, which is defined as a ghost or something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence. Sounds about right.

Unless you had access to tenth-generation blurry bootleg tapes, The Compleat Beatles was the only place to view, snippets unfortunately, of the Hey Jude, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields Forever videos, among others. Trying to remember them in the early 1980s, years after they originally aired on television, was often like seeking to recall a dream.

There’s a directness to the documentary that you’ll not find in any of the Apple-approved material out today. (Speaking about Magical Mystery Tour, it describes how the aim was to film whatever happens on the bus trip, before dryly adding, “unfortunately nothing did.” We also see the band labor through a 1966 live version of If I Needed Someone that’s sluggish, off-key, George forgetting the lyrics).

Apparently originally released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Love Me Do, more than forty years later The Compleat Beatles is a concise, unbiased introduction to the Beatles story.