And the bright days are here

The summer of 1966 was ugly and violent.

James Meredith, the first black student enrolled into the University of Mississippi, began walking across the south to encourage voter registration. Shot three times in full view of the police and FBI, he survived. 

In July Richard Speck was arrested four days after killing eight student nurses in their Chicago dormitory. 

On August 1, 25-year-old engineering student Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, carried five rifles to the top of the observation tower on the University of Texas campus and in just 90 minutes shot 31 people, killing 13. Later that month, Martin Luther King led a march through Chicago and met a hostile mob numbering at least 5,000. Once a thrown rock hit King, it signaled a hail of bottles, rocks and firecrackers. Two days later a race riot broke out in East Lansing, Michigan, and three days later, the American Nazi Party held a Chicago rally with 3,000 in attendance, swastikas and white power signs fully visible.

In Vietnam, the U.S. began digging itself a hole in earnest as monthly troop casualties increased exponentially: 268 Americans in June, 277 in July and 297 in August.

The U.S. experienced an intense heat wave as New York City recorded a mean daily temperature of 90.3 degrees for July, with a high of 101. Some 2,250 deaths nationwide were attributed to the heat.

But beyond the headlines, the Top 40 caught a glimpse of a much different mood, a celebration of an upbeat, idyllic season.

Happy Summer Days – Ronnie Dove (highest chart position #27): A strumming banjo and Ray Conniff-styled background singers gave this a real Mitch Miller feel, one of those records probably purchased mostly by parents.

Summer In the City – Lovin’ Spoonful (#1): Their only number one. There’s so much to like about this record, from John Sebastian’s committed vocals to the car horn and jackhammer sound effects to the racket of guitars and drums – like a summer thunderstorm – before the fadeout.

Sunny – Bobby Hebb (#2): Born in Nashville to blind musicians, the day after JFK was assassinated, Hebb’s older brother was killed in a knife fight outside a nightclub. Overcome by back-to-back tragedies, Hebb wrote the optimistic Sunny, today a pop standard with hundreds of cover versions.

Sunshine Superman – Donovan (#1): Outright psychedelia, from lyrics that kinda sorta reference LSD to Jimmy Page's guitar. Green Lantern always seemed like an odd choice in the lyric, given his secondary status in the DC universe.

Summertime – Billy Stewart (#10): Gershwin song made memorable by Stewart’s trademark scatting and trilling, the calls of a weird summer bird.

Sunny Afternoon – Kinks (#14): A “fallen aristocrat,” as described by Ray Davies, bemoans his fate: paying taxes, having his yacht taken away and a girlfriend who complains about his “drunkenness and cruelty.” Heady stuff for the Top 40.

Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra (#25): Speaking of super-heroes, 11-year-old me heard the reference to a “piper man” as “Spider-Man,” confusing me to no end.

See You in September – The Happenings (#3): 313 American troops died in Vietnam in September 1966.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians

 The following is part of the It Grew On Me blogathon hosted by 

Taking Up Room 

“How much time is left? (Pauses the DVR). An hour and twenty minutes?

“Kevin McCarthy’s wig looks like the Cowardly Lion’s mane. And is that Paul Newman’s real hair?

“Shelley Duvall? Oh, right, it’s a Robert Altman movie.

“Maybe a tumbleweed got stuck on Kevin McCarthy’s head.”

To say I was distracted the first time I watched Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) is understating things.

But giving it another try, and overlooking all the superficial criticisms, it clicked.

There’s a first-rate – and the obligatory comment that must be made about a Robert Altman movie – ensemble cast: Newman, McCarthy, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, Geraldine Chaplin, John Considine and Will Sampson.

Plus, there’s that Altman touch of dropping everyone into an isolated outpost, then moving back and forth between different plotlines. Here, the setting is Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, a combination rodeo/historical re-enactment spectacular, all built around its namesake star attraction.

It’s 1885 and thanks to his Wild West show and dime novels, Buffalo Bill (Newman) is one of the most famous people in the world. But Cody’s reputation as scout, buffalo hunter and trailblazing plainsman is a manufactured image. His fabled long locks are a wig, and he finds it increasingly difficult to remember the details of his legendary exploits. The “historical” re-enactments featured in his shows portray Native Americans as either noble savages or murderers.

He’s also insulated from reality, an egotistical ass propped up by sycophants (Grey, McCarthy) and useless relatives (Keitel) and with a weakness for sopranos and booze. (Cody has one drink a day, but it comes in a mammoth chalice).

Grey, Keitel and Newman

Two new arrivals into this world crack Cody’s footing further. One is Ned Buntline (Lancaster), the writer who created the legend of Buffalo Bill and the single person, aside from Cody, who knows it’s buffalo bullshit. “No ordinary man would realize what tremendous profits could be made by telling a pack of lies in front of witnesses like it was the truth,” he says of Cody.

The second is Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), who has been added to the show. The mute Bull is accompanied by fellow tribesman William Halsey (Sampson), and they unnerve Cody by refusing to participate in a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand, and by spookily disappearing, then reappearing, seemingly at will.

Bill and Bull

After Sitting Bull leaves the show, he is killed by U.S. Indian agents. One night soon afterwards, Cody confronts the chief’s spirit – and his own self-doubts – yelling and carrying on an imaginary (and one way) conversation, like a frontier MacBeth, with Bull’s ghost.

But with Sitting Bull dead, Cody is free to add a scripted showstopping duel to the death between Cody and the chief, how played by Halsey. Cody, of course, always comes out on top.

Paul Newman is terrific throughout, whether rakishly galloping around the arena to cheering crowds or ranting about the superiority of white people dressed in his nightclothes. Burt Lancaster is quietly charismatic with the marginal yet important role of Ned Buntline, the living embodiment of this famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Harvey Keitel is studiously dimwitted as Cody’s nephew, and Geraldine Chaplin’s Annie Oakley, outside of Sitting Bull and Halsey, is the film’s most likeable character. For quirky casting, President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland are played by odd couple Pat McCormick and Shelley Duvall.

Released one week before the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration and under a heightened awareness of American Indian rights via the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, Buffalo Bill and the Indians presents its case for the U.S. entertainment industry’s distortion of the truth about the relationship between whites and Native Americans.

Whitewashing U.S. history, we’re reminded, is a long-time tradition, one that continues today.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians can currently be found on the usual free platforms. Hopefully it will grow on you too, once you get past Kevin McCarthy’s wig.

Don Draper meets the Beatles

As if further evidence was needed that John, Paul, George and Ringo were sent here by a higher civilization to move modern culture forward, Revolver was released sixty years ago this week (August 5, actually). Their seventh studio album, covering a range of musical styles, was a trailblazer, earning praise ever since.

For a 2012 episode of Mad Men, its producers paid $250,000 for the rights to Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track on Revolver.

Throughout its run, Mad Men always made smart choices about its use of music, always period accurate and with a lyric that underscored plot or character development. Satisfaction, You Only Live Twice and I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing come to mind.

Here, Tomorrow Never Knows with its prescient title, serves as metaphor for Don Draper’s puzzled efforts to understand youth culture and for the episode’s chaotic final scenes of work colleagues smoking pot in the office afterhours, and others trying to grapple with the usual suburban sex shenanigans.

Draper’s younger wife Megan has bought the new Beatles album and tells Don, “Start here,” indicating Tomorrow Never Knows.

No.

You don’t read Moby Dick backwards or watch Citizen Kane starting with the last scene.

Don tries, but he seemingly has no patience for Tomorrow Never Knows. He turns it off before it ends. It’s noisy, distracting, like something turned inside out and upside down.

But what if he plays Revolver the right way starting with the opening track?

Well, for one thing it would have made for a boring episode.

Opening track Taxman reminds Don that he’s now making major money as agency partner and he’s overdue to check in with his accountant.

Here, There and Everywhere is nice, close enough in his mind to Patti Page’s Old Cape Cod, the standard he’s always had a soft spot for. He notes to himself that it could work as background music for a TWA commercial.

He knows Yellow Submarine from his kids singing the chorus endlessly when he had them over last weekend. Doesn’t like it.

Don refills his tumbler of scotch and flips the record over.

He likes Good Day Sunshine, it’s bouncy, happy, a throwback to the musical movies he watched as a kid when the audience followed the bouncing ball and sang along.

For No One is an emotional black hole, dredging up memories of first wife Betty, the “you stay home, she goes out” break-up song about “a love that should have lasted years.” Time to top off that tumbler.

Got To Get You into My Life is ad territory again. Punchy, with a memorable chorus that could work for any brand.

As Tomorrow Never Knows comes on, the booze is making a statement. He gets up and turns the record player off before the song is finished. He finds the bedroom and switches on the portable television. It’s August, nothing but reruns and a Mets game.

Turning off his mind, he relaxes and floats downstream.

One Trick Pony

Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was one of the last in a string of rock-star movie vanity projects, drug and/or ego-driven spectaculars like Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles), Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan), A Poem is a Naked Person (Leon Russell), Journey Through the Past (Neil Young) and 200 Motels (Frank Zappa). No matter how surreal, artsy or faux documentary, once the vibe of self-indulgence escapes the bottle, it’s difficult putting it back.

One Trick Pony, written by and starring Simon, is a straightforward narrative about an “aging” rock star attempting to fix a broken marriage, keep his band on the road and record a hit that’ll get back him into the big time.

The idea of rock stars growing older was a thing in 1980 as Lennon and Dylan approached 40 and Woodstock was more than ten years in the rearview mirror. Classic rock (when it was still just plain “rock”) was gasping for air and couldn’t keep up with the energy and zest of punk and new wave.

Simon plays one-hit wonder Jonah Levin, lucky enough to stay off the oldies carousel as he continues to tour and write new music, a lifestyle that ultimately busted his marriage. “You get to a certain age and rock and roll is sort of pathetic,” scolds his wife (Blair Brown).

Sure, she’s bitter but Jonah is performing songs with titles like How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns and God Bless the Absentee. He’s not exactly Ozzy Osbourne or Lux Interior.

One Trick Pony may reveal more about Paul Simon than Jonah Levin. If Art Garfunkel could have an acting career working with hotshot directors like Mike Nichols and Nicolas Roeg, why not Simon? And if Artie could unveil his pale scrawniness in Carnal Knowledge (1971) and in the originally rated X and released a few months before One Trick Pony, Bad Timing (1980), why couldn’t Simon? In One Trick Pony we get two bathtub scenes, bedroom sex with Brown and, most embarrassing of all, Simon’s naked torso with tight jeans, more Burt Reynolds than sensitive singer/songwriter.

The one time when Simon allows himself to be filmed in an unflattering light is when he and his band walk through an airport: he looks to be nearly a foot shorter than his fellow musicians, and with his perpetual oversized baseball cap and solemn look comes off like a Little Leaguer braving a stomachache.

Simon’s acting is serviceable, much better than the wooden line readings he gave in Annie Hall (1977). Jonah’s band, an all-star group of studio musicians, cook during the live concert numbers, the only time Simon seems to come alive. A collegiate looking Lou Reed plays a record producer and when Jonah agrees to appear at a “salute to the sixties” event, there’s some exciting footage of Sam & Dave, plus a reunited Lovin’ Spoonful. And Tiny Tim wearing this cool custom suit.

If anything, One Trick Pony is notable today as possible source material for This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Harry Shearer has a brief role as Jonah’s manager, a member of Jonah’s band offhandedly mentions "the bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'" and the band shows up for a three-date gig only to find the club shuttered after the owner ran off with the money. Jonah’s band also plays Cleveland’s Agora Ballroom, obviously successfully navigating the “little jog to the left” and finding the stage.

Clocking in at two and a half minutes, Paul Simon wrote one of the best songs about the ups and downs of a traveling musician on the road, Homeward Bound. There was no need to stretch it out into ninety minutes.

Born on the Fourth of July

In George Vecsey’s excellent 2006 book Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, he devotes a chapter to the New York Yankees titled Why the Yankees Exist, writing “Quite like America itself, the Yankees were either classic champions, envied and admired all over the world, or else they were haughty oppressors, resented down the downtrodden masses.”

Moving on to George Steinbrenner (again, this is 2006), Vecsey added: “New York in the mid-1970s encouraged more flamboyant magnates. A builder with eccentric orange hair and equally flaming ego, Donald Trump, openly boasted about his real estate prowess.

“The Boss (Steinbrenner) seemed to take his cue from being born on the Fourth of July, surrounding the Yankees with patriotic rituals involving flags, anthems, military choruses, and, for playoff games, trained American eagles soaring over Yankee Stadium."

This is the same Steinbrenner who was convicted of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign (with no prison time) and was suspended from baseball at one point for paying a known gambler to dig up dirt about Dave Winfield, with whom he was feuding.

He was quotable and commandeered the back pages of New York City’s tabloids, then hijacked national sports pages on the morning of the 2010 All-Star Game by dying.

Gee, much of this seems strangely familiar. 

Factoring in their separate relationships with Rudy Giuliani and this sentence – frightening in so many ways – from Wikipedia's Steinbrenner entry: "In 1989, after seeing Donald Trump on The Morton Downey Jr. Show, he wrote a letter to Trump suggesting he should run for president," the public lives of Steinbrenner and Trump are intertwined in many ways.

Yankee fans of a certain age learned that if they squinted hard enough, Steinbrenner’s lording over their favorite team could fade into the background. Today, some New York Giants fans are learning to compartmentalize Jaxson Dart’s apparent admiration for the current administration. Or as many did a decade ago, choosing to look past all that embarrassing commentary by several NBA players that the earth was flat.

Sometimes viewing things through that sort of lens is the only way to keep your sanity. 

P.S.

George Vecsey turns 86 on July 4. As a reporter for Newsday and The New York Times he covered the New York Mets from their inception; his 1970 book Joy in Mudville is the franchise’s origin story. Vecsey also wrote Coal Miner’s Daughter, about Loretta Lynn and was one of 25 Newsday journalists who contributed to the 1969 novel Naked Came the Stranger, a satire of the then-current popular literature, as well as sex in suburbia. There’s some Metsiana in the name of the main character in Vecsey’s contribution, Morton Earbrow, inspired by Casey Stengel who said Gil Hodges was so strong that he could "squeeze your earbrows off."

Testing the limits of Batmania

One can only imagine how aggravating a day June 25, 1966, was for Adam West.

He’d signed on for two personal appearances at Shea Stadium, at 2 and 7:30 p.m., part of a concert that included Frank Gorshin, the Young Rascals, the Temptations, the Chiffons and Junior Walker and the All-Stars, and it was coming apart.

The show’s promotor was Harry Bloomfield who, although convicted of income tax evasion in 1949, was still granted a license to put on the show. A thousand tickets were stolen from a publicist’s office, and several of the booked acts, including Skitch Henderson and his Tonight Show Orchestra and M.C. Bruce Morrow, abandoned ship because of dismal ticket sales.

The local Teamsters union, fearful that they wouldn’t get paid, threatened to walk before the show until West personally guaranteed the crew’s payment in advance.

As it got closer to 2 p.m. it was obvious that only around 3,000 people were in attendance as. All this and West had to wear his Batman costume, the gloves, the tights, the cowl as the afternoon temperature climbed to 87 degrees.

After the musical acts, a gate in leftfield opened and West as Batman was driven around the field in a Cadillac convertible – not the Batmobile – close enough to the stands to shake hands with the overheated kids in attendance. As the PA system echoed through the nearly empty stadium, West reached the stage and asked, “Have you seen any unusual looking people around here?”, the cue for Frank Gorshin as the Riddler to appear on stage. A sample of their onstage schtick: Riddler: “Why are the Mets like my mother-in-law’s cookies? (Riddler is married?) They need a better batter.”

West and Gorshin left the stage, then reappeared without costumes. West sang. Gorshin did celebrity impressions. Reportedly the 7:30 show was better attended, but even an audience of 5,000 in a place that seats 55,000 makes for an oppressive scene.

If it was the first true test of Batmania, it failed. The franchise wobbled a bit but recovered the next month when the Batman movie opened and scored well at the box office.

After the concert, promotor Bloomfield concluded, “Shea Stadium is not conducive to concerts.” When he was reminded about the Beatles’ capacity concert there, Bloomfield replied, “The Beatles were a freak attraction.”

The Incredible World of James Bond

On November 26, 1965, the day after Thanksgiving, NBC fittingly pre-empted The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to run The Incredible World of James Bond, an hour-long documentary that, given its sweep and licensing rights to all the Bond films made up till then – Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and the upcoming Thunderball – survives as the definitive statement on a cultural phenomenon.

I watched the show when it originally aired, an eleven-year-old already stuck in the snare of Bondmania (not to mention Beatlemania and lurking around the corner in just four months’ time, Batmania) and it was a trip watching scenes from Goldfinger – the Aston Martin, Oddjob’s electrocution, the laser beam aimed at Bond’s family jewels – in our living room.

The full movie wouldn’t air on network television until September 1972.

The Incredible World of James Bond also gave us a rare glimpse of the very proper Ian Fleming wandering about Goldeneye, his Jamaican estate, in a safari jacket, cigarette holder clenched in his mouth, with a reminder that Fleming didn’t look any farther than his bookshelf for a name for his fictional spy, a nature guide titled Birds of the West Indies by ornithologist James Bond.

A segment on Bond tie-in merchandise included the elusive, only-rich-kids-can-afford-it 007 Road Race set and the 007 attache case, plus a line of men’s wear, perfect for lounging about after consuming the Bond’s room service breakfast in From Russia with Love (and shown in a segment covering his refined tastes) of green figs, yogurt and coffee, very black.

What recently triggered all this was the sudden appearance on YouTube of this ad which ran during the program and suckered me right in:

Here’s my original copy of the album, delivered on January 14, 1966 (according to my childish scrawl).

Adjusted for inflation, a single U.S. dollar in 1966 had the purchasing power of about $10.19 today, making the record, and factoring in the purchase of a bag of Fritos, a bit of a ripoff for the kind of budget LP found in supermarkets and bargain bids, but it seemed well worth it at the time.

The record found a place in my collection and came in handy when I made tapes for road trips in my 1973 Toyota Corona – standard model, no ejector seat – as one of my favorite tricks was to fade out the Bond theme into Johnny Rivers’ Secret Agent Man.

The album would have also made excellent background music while I watched the slot cars in that road racing set go around and round. Anybody who could afford the racing cars wouldn’t have thought twice about spending another buck on the record.