Lennon vs Zappa

 

During the first few days of December, we remember two musical icons who died this month; John Lennon, who was murdered on December 8, 1980 and Frank Zappa, who died of prostate cancer on December 4, 1993.

Lennon and Zappa were both born in 1940 and came of musical age in the 1960's. The two grew up listening to Rhythm and Blues, although they went off in different directions.

In the '60's, when the Beatles were playing , I preferred their music over the music being created by Zappa and his Mothers of Invention. Over the years, I have completely changed my views on Lennon and Zappa.

Lennon was obviously more well known and certainly more commercially successful. Unfortunately, I don't think Lennon was able to cope with fame and fortune, and as he became more involved with drugs, his music suffered.

Zappa, on the other hand, was anti-drug - with the tragic exception of nicotine. Zappa's music continued to grow and evolve through out his life, and today, twenty seven years after his death, his music is continuing to be released from his archives.

For several years after the break up of the Beatles, Lennon isolated himself and basically retired from the music scene, until just before his death. One obvious difference I see between the two artists was the way they each approached performing. Zappa was able to orchestrate and lead his group of musicians in a performance of Lennon's "I Am the Walrus".....something Lennon would not have been able to do. The orchestration of the Beatles' version was done by producer George Martin. Lennon would not have been able to to perform the song in concert.

Music Most Lame

For the first time in his fifty eight year career, Bob Dylan has finally charted a number hit on Billboard with a 17 minute "song" entitled Murder Most Foul.

I was tempted to refer to it as Music Most Foul after my attempt to listen to it, but that changed to Music Most Boring until finally deciding on the title of this post, Music Most Lame.

 I couldn't force myself to listen to the entire song, although I was able to scan over the lyrics found online.

Dylan was 22 when JFK was assassinated - I was 11 - and he's still processing it's meaning today. For many years, when I was growing up, no one spoke any ill of President Kennedy. We were convinced that he had been a saint. My generation came to hate the Vietnam War and the U.S. Presidents involved in the war - particularly Johnson and Nixon, but we were ignorant for the most part, of Kennedy's role in the war.

Being currently trapped at home during this covid19 pandemic I've been spending a good deal of my time watching Netflix. As I write this, I've just finished watching two episodes of Ken Burn's documentary of the Vietnam war and my opinion of JFK has fallen. Kennedy's reputation had suffered in my view years ago when I first learned of his extramarital affairs and now it's at rock bottom.

Little wonder that he was so admired by Bill Clinton.

Celsius 233 - An Update

At the bottom of each blog post, you'll find the words "You might also like:" and displays of other posts which might appeal to the readers of this humble blog. From time to time, I'll click on one myself to return to the scene of the crime, as it were, to read something I wrote earlier.

Today, I re-read a post from February, 2017 - Celsius 233. In that post, I wrote of my having saved on Spotify the recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performing the film scores of Bernard Herrmann. I've long been a fan of Hermann's work with Alfred Hitchcock, but I had not known at the time that Hermann had also written the musical score for the 1966 film, Fahrenheit 451.

In the earlier post, I wrote :

"Listening to the work this afternoon, my attention was drawn to Hermann's score for Fahrenheit 451. It had been years since I last watched the film - long before I knew the work of Bernard Hermann, and seeing the film listed on the LP, I thought of finding a way of watching it again. After doing an Internet search, and achieving less than satisfactory results, I was finally able to locate the entire film here."

I had included a link to the film on Youtube, but sadly the video has been removed. I'm sure there was a copyright issue. Today, when I discovered the video had been removed, I searched to see if the film could be found on ok.ru - a website which cares not one whit for copyright laws. Of course, I did find the film on the ok.ru site, but ironically, it has been dubbed into Russian.

I also wrote in 2017:

"As I say, it's been years since I've seen the film and I'm not at all certain that I ever got around to actually reading Ray Bradbury's novel. Being the cheapskate that I am, I searched for a copy as an e-book - free, of course. I've located a copy as a pdf here. At some point, I will convert the pdf to mobi for reading on Kindle. I can't say when that will be - I have a long list of novels in the queue".

It never made it into the queue.

The original pdf linked to in my post gives the page count as 77. That number looks suspiciously short to me, so I started a new search today.

I found a pdf on Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Press but at 108 pages, this seems to be an excerpt as well.

At 152 pages, the longest "free" copy is found at Internet Archive.

I suppose I could have saved all this work had I been inclined to buy the e-book from Amazon.

I'm not there yet.

Runaway Horses

Having finished book one - Spring Snow - in Yukio Mishima's tetralogy,.The Sea of Fertility, I began reading book 2, Runaway Horses. I was most definitely impressed with the first novel.

The only problem I have with the second novel is the book within the book - so called The League of the Divine Wind by Tsunanori Yamao. This booklet - more rightly called a pamphlet, is an important element in the overall novel, but the pamphlet seems to drag on.

All else considered, the 2nd novel is very good. I'm 70% in and am looking forward to book number 3.

As a side note, one of the characters - Prince Harunori Toin - at one point decides to listen to a recording of Western music to put him in a better frame of mind. He listens to Richard Strauss' Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Op. 28) which he soon discovers is not having the affect he thought it would have. Being unfamiliar with the work, I looked for a recording YouTube. Strauss has never been one of my favorites and I can see why Prince Harunori Toin would regret listening to this work.

Yukio Mishima - or Getting From Point A to Point B

I'm very often surprised whenever I examine the path I've taken to reach point B from point A. One case in point is how I've come to read the novel I have currently on my Kindle.

A few days ago, I was watching a collection of films starring (or featuring) James Cagney. One such film was the 1931 comedy, The Millionaire in which Cagney had a brief appearance. I was unfamiliar with most of the actors in the film, and curiosity lead me to search the Internet for information about them. One of the stars of the film was Canadian-American actor, David Manners who played John Harker in the 1931 horror classic Dracula, which starred Bela Lugosi in the title role.

Learning that Manners was in Dracula led me to hunt for that film on the Internet. It had been ages since I've watched this classic movie, and luckily I was able to locate it at vimeo.com.

In 1999, Lugosi's Dracula was released for home video, with an updated soundtrack composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet. I was so impressed by Glass' composition that I had to search for more work by the composer.

One of the works composed by Glass that I found on Spotify, was the film score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - a film based on the life and work of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Of course, now I had to learn more about Yukio Mishima.

According to Wikipedia, Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. His tetralogy of novels, The Sea of Fertility is considered his masterpiece.

Twelve works written by Mishima are available as mobi files at archive.org. My first choice was to download all four novels from the tetralogy. After beginning the first novel, Spring Snow, I returned to archive.org to download the entire Mishima collection.

Sinead O'Connor Converts to Islam

It's been a long time since I've made any comment on the bizarre behavior of Sinead O'Connor - seven years, in fact, when she obtained her fourth divorce.

Her attempt to be ordained a Catholic priest occured in 1999, long before the creation of this blog.

Now, I've learned that O'Conner has has converted to Islam and changed her name to Shuhada' Davitt.

Far be it from me to say that Ms. O'Conner/Davitt isn't serious in her conversion. I simply wonder about her need to inform the world of the conversion.

Egypt Station - A Review

Paul McCartney is not my favorite Beatle. That honor goes to the late George Harrison. For that matter, I'm not sure if he's even my favorite living Beatle. He and Yoko may be in a tie for 2nd place.

When I first heard that McCartney had released a new work - Egypt Station - I wasn't really all that interested in listening to it. It wasn't until after reading of his embarrassing escapade as described in Vanity Fair, that I had a desire to give the new album a listen. I thought, if McCartney felt that getting the word out that he had a new album was worth telling a story about a Lennon/McCartney group masturbation episode, then I'd check out the album on Spotify.

I thought, no matter how embarrassing the music is, it can't be as embarrassing as his pre-Beatle circle jerk session story.

I've listened to the album twice on Spotify. No, the album isn't horrible. Some of the songs are pleasant enough, but if you're looking for a memorable tune, look somewhere else. There's really nothing new - we've heard all this before. There are no surprises. No Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, Yesterday or even Helter Skelter.

These songs might have been passable had they been written forty-five years ago, but in 2018, the entire album is a stale, warmed over vanilla pudding.

After listening to the album for the 2nd time, I had to rinse the vanilla from my brain by filling it with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Lick my Decals off, Baby. That certainly did the trick.

Urbain Grandier

In was in the early 1980s that I first learned of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century French Catholic priest who was burned at the stake, after being found guilty of witchcraft in a case involving "demonic possession" of nuns in the town of Loudun, France. One of the cable movie channels (Showtime, Cinemax, or HBO) was running the 1971 Ken Russell film, The Devils. The film was based on the 1952 non-fiction novel by Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun.

Being curious, I went on a search for Huxley's book. A copy of the book was supposed to be available at my local public library, but I was told that the book was frequently stolen when placed on the shelf. There was a copy available behind the main desk, but it could not be checked out. The book could only be read in the library.

Fortunately for me, there was a very nice used book store in town. The owner could find any book - for a price, of course. I purchased a copy from her. I cannot say what became of the book.

I bring this up now because the story of Grandier is told in volume four of Alexandre Dumas' Celebrated Crimes. Sadly, the series could have been entitled Celebrated Crimes by Christians. A good many of the crimes described by Dumas illustrate the horrors committed by some using God's name.

According to a Wikipedia article, the French historian Jules Michelet discussed Grandier in a chapter of La Sorcière. An English translation of La Sorcière is available at Project Gutenberg. That book is now on my list of books to read in 2018.

The Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an opera, Die Teufel von Loudun based on the story. I was unable to find a copy of the opera on Spotify - although many of Penderecki's works are - but a TV version of the opera can be found on Youtube.

Grace is no longer Slick

It doesn't bother me that Grace Slick doesn't care for Donald Trump, Madonna, or Kim Kardashian. She's not a fan of the current "younger generation" either. I suppose that's ok because they're probably not fans of her.



No, what did bother me about the recent Variety.com article on Grace Slick is Variety's use of a photograph for the article that has to be at least fifty years old.

Grace Slick is a 'has-been' who hasn't been relevant musically for many, many years; not even as a nostalgia act. The only way Slick's opinion of the current POSTUS could be relevant to today's young radicals is for news about her to use her younger, more attractive, hipper photos.

Grace Slick will be 78 soon. Show her as she really is.

The Snow Job of Kilimanjaro

It was through his work with Alfred Hitchcock [Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo] that I first became a fan of composer Bernard Hermann. Recently, I'm been listening to one of Hermann's scores for a film I haven't seen - The Snows of Kilimanjaro, starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner.

The film is in the public domain and available for viewing on Youtube, but sadly with the dismally slow Internet that I have to live with here, it is impossible for me to watch it. It seems a bit odd to me that I can stream music via Spotify (including the original soundtrack to The Snows of Kilimanjaro) but not videos.

With the film being in the public domain, it's unlikely that it will be shown on TCM. Someone has to make money, after all. So, it's unlikely that I'll see the movie any time in the near future.

After looking for an image to include with this post, the one I've chosen to use has an odd statement regarding the film - "Ernest Hemingway's Greatest Love Story!".

What a bunch of B.S.

Although I haven't seen the film, I know that the short story, as written by Hemingway can hardly be called a love story - great or otherwise. Ava Gardner's character isn't even in Hemingway's story. We know that Hollywood can't let artistic accuracy stand in the way of making a buck. Maybe the poster should say The Snow Job of Kilimanjaro.

Comedians' Theme Songs

In my recent post on Al Bowlly, I put up a Youtube video of Bowlly's recording, with Lew Stone's orchestra of  Love in Bloom. The tune is best remembered today as the theme song of comedian Jack Benny. It was only during these days of Youtube that I learned the song actually has lyrics.

Growing up during the early days of TV, I received a heavy dose of old radio comedians such as Benny, Bob Hope and Burns and Allen as they made the move over to television. Unlike comedians today, these comedians had "theme songs" which became identified with their persona. Benny had "Love in Bloom, Hope had Thanks for the Memory, while the theme song for Burns and Allen was The Love Nest, written by Louis Hirsch.

I learned yesterday - thanks to the Internet - that the Benny theme and the Hope theme song were both written by the same song writing team, Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin. Having died in 1924, Hirsch would not reap the financial benefits of having his music played on radio and TV every time Burns and Allen made an appearance. Likewise, Rainger died in 1942 - long before Hope's heyday on television.

Leo Robin, however, lived until 1984 - dying long before Bob Hope, but ten years after Benny. I'm hoping he was able to live comfortably on the residuals.

Al Bowlly

Yesterday I was surfing Youtube and Spotify, looking for unfamiliar music that I might enjoy listening to. That search brought me to a singer whose name was familiar although her recordings weren't - Sophie Tucker. Videos of Ms. Tucker on Youtube lead me to a brand new discovery : Al Bowlly.
Bowlly was a popular English crooner during the 1930s.

In spite of Bowlly's immense popularity during his life time, I had never heard of him. Perhaps his death during a German air attack on London lead to his soon being forgotten.

His recordings are available on Spotify, as well as videos on Youtube. During the height of his career, Bowlly was performing and recording with two orchestras - one led by Ray Noble, and the other by Lew Stone.

Examples of his work with both orchestras are below:

Uncle Meat

Speaking of Facebook notifications, I learned yesterday, that April 21 was the 48th anniversary of the release of The Mothers of Invention's fifth LP, (Zappa's sixth) Uncle Meat.

Although I was a fan of the Mothers, it was only recently that I listened to the entire album. When Uncle Meat was released, I had copies of Freak-Out!, Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For The Money. As far as I can recall, I had only heard portions of the LP that an acquaintance of mine owned. The little I heard at the time did not convince me to run out and get a copy for myself.

That's my loss, of course.

Listening to the LP today (thanks to Spotify) I understand that the work was ahead of its time. I could not appreciate the LP at the time. There are many today that still cannot appreciate Uncle Meat, but after years of listening to Zappa, Edgard Varèse, and Igor Stravinsky, I can say, although it's hardly Easy Listening, I do easy listening to Uncle Meat .

Frédéric isn't on my Chopin List

As I've mentioned more than a few times, of the top ten best selling novels of 1917, In the Wilderness by Robert S. Hichens is my current favorite. However, there is one scene in the novel which I thought to be out of place.

Near the end of the novel, we're told that one of the main characters of the novel, Mrs.Cynthia Clarke is an accomplished pianist - at this point playing one of Frédéric Chopin's Études. I would have thought that her being an accomplished pianist would have been a talent that would have been presented to us earlier in the novel. I suppose Hichens wished to present a particular mood by having the character play Étude Op. 10, No. 6, in E-flat minor, but having Mrs. Clarke suddenly playing the piano didn't seem to fit.

I'm not a complete moron regarding Western Classical Music but I will admit that I am certainly no expert of Chopin. I went to Spotify to locate and listen to the Études. I'm sorry to say that Chopin isn't my cup of tea (or coffee or vodka either, for that matter).

Celsius 233

One of the musical works saved by me on Spotify is of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performing the film scores of Bernard Herrmann. (the recording on Youtube can be found here. My favorite film score on the album is Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Psycho.

Listening to the work this afternoon, my attention was drawn to Hermann's score for Fahrenheit 451. It had been years since I last watched the film - long before I knew the work of Bernard Hermann, and seeing the film listed on the LP, I thought of finding a way of watching it again. After doing an Internet search, and achieving less than satisfactory results, I was finally able to locate the entire film here.

As I say, it's been years since I've seen the film and I'm not at all certain that I ever got around to actually reading Ray Bradbury's novel. Being the cheapskate that I am, I searched for a copy as an e-book - free, of course. I've located a copy as a pdf here. At some point, I will convert the pdf to mobi for reading on Kindle. I can't say when that will be - I have a long list of novels in the queue.

Et tu, U2? More Trump Derangement Syndrome

In a spectacular display of Trump Derangment syndrome, U2 has decided to delay their upcoming album after Donald Trump's election as POTUS.

Really?

What a load of pretentious, self absorbed twaddle.

U2's guitarist, The Edge (that's not pretentious, is it?) told Rolling Stone that with Trump's election, the world is a different place. Cuz like, you know, like the 80's and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and whatever.

But then again, how seriously can we take a band whose leader believes we should combat ISIS with comedy?

A Quiet, Peaceful New Year's Day

I spent New Year's eve in much the same way as I spent Christmas eve. My wife, my son and myself attended late Mass at San Antonio de Padua parish church in Sibulan, followed by a visit to the home of my wife's parents. Normally, we attend Mass at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Redemptorist Church in Dumaguete. Although the church in Sibulan is within walking distance of our apartment, three of the priests at "Perpetual" are from Ireland and we can attend Mass given by a native speaker of English. We will, however, attend Mass in Sibulan on very special occasions - such as Christmas and New Year's. By attending last night's Mass, we were able to fulfill our Holy Day of Obligation (Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God). I haven't been feeling well for a couple of days and it was nice sleeping in this morning.

It's normally quiet in our neighborhood on Sunday morning, but today is especially nice - last night's drunken revelers are still asleep. At some time within the last few months, the owners of the sari-sari store across the street from my in-laws purchased a pay for play videoke machine. Needless to say, it was going full tilt last night. I've been accused of being a "KJ" (kill joy) and someone who doesn't appreciate Filipino tradition because of my hatred of drunken karaoke. Has it already been (nearly) a year since I posted that karaoke is audio waterboarding?

Frank Zappa

On this day - December 4 - in 1993, Frank Zappa died at the age of 53 from prostate cancer.

I had been a fan of Zappa's since 1966 when his group, The Mothers of Invention, released their first LP, Freak Out!. During his lifetime, Zappa released 62 albums (with and without the Mothers). I probably owned 40 of those LPs.

 Since his death, the Zappa family has released an additional 43 albums. Fortunately, for Zappa fans, this material is available on Spotify.

Sugarcane Harris

Listening to Zappa's Burnt Weeny Sandwich LP, I recall the terrific violin playing of Don Sugarcane Harris, who was featured on the LP.

Searching the Internet for information about Harris, I discovered that the wikipedia article on him gives his date of death as both November 27, 1999 and November 30, 1999. The footnote verifying his DOD is a link to Harris' New York Times obit which states that Harris was found dead on Dec.1 in his Los Angeles apartment by his landlord. His independent.co.uk obit gives the DOD as Dec.1st.

Evidently, the exact date isn't known, due to his having been found dead some time after the fact.

All Things Must Pass

On November 27, fortysix years ago, in 1970 when I was a mere 18 year old whippersnapper, George Harrison realeased his solo album, All Things Must Pass.
From the wikipedia article on the LP:
"According to Colin Larkin, writing in the 2011 edition of his Encyclopedia of Popular Music, All Things Must Pass is 'generally rated' as the best of all the former Beatles' solo albums".

I would go one step further, I would consider it the best of all the former Beatles solo or group albums. I consider it better than any Beatle LP.
Period.