The endless summer

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. He was shot three times in full view of the police and FBI for his troubles. He survived the attack. 

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.

Yeah, the headlines were grim, but the Top 40 caught a glimpse of a much different summer, 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 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 recorded 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 misheard 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.