Originally written by Sonny Curtis and released in 1970, “Love Is All Around”–otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore theme song–has been covered by many acts: Sammy Davis Jr, Hüsker Dü, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, to name a few. After releasing a studio version in 1996, Jett performed the song live on the Late Show with David Letterman that same year. If you’re old enough, this performance will give you a double dose of nostalgia. It lets you recall the spirit of 1970s second-wave-feminist television, and it recaptures the sheer playfulness of Letterman’s freewheeling 90s late night show. Enjoy!
David Bowie always managed to look cool, even when he was being booked for a felony.
In early 1976, Bowie was on his “Isolar” tour, performing as the Thin White Duke, a persona he would describe as “a very Aryan fascist type — a would-be romantic with no emotions at all.” Bowie invited his friend and sometime creative collaborator Iggy Pop to travel with him.
In the early morning hours of March 21, after a concert at the Community War Memorial arena in Rochester, New York, four local vice squad detectives and a state police investigator searched Bowie’s three-room suite at the Americana Rochester Hotel. According to reports in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the cops found 182 grams (a little over 6.4 ounces) of marijuana there. Bowie and three others — Pop, a bodyguard named Dwain Voughns, and a young Rochester woman named Chiwah Soo — were charged with fifth-degree criminal possession of marijuana, a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Bowie and Pop were booked under their real names, David Jones and James Osterberg Jr. The group spent the rest of the night in the Monroe County Jail and were released at about 7 a.m. on $2,000 bond each. They were supposed to be arraigned the next day, but Bowie left town to go to his next concert in Springfield, Massachusetts. His lawyer appeared and asked for the court’s indulgence, explaining the heavy penalties for breaking concert engagements. He promised the judge that Bowie would appear the following morning, March 23.
Bowie showed up for his arraignment looking dapper in his Thin White Duke clothing. It was then that his mug shot was taken — so we’ll never actually know what Bowie looked like when he was unexpectedly dragged into jail at 3 a.m. The police escorted the rock star in and out of the courtroom mostly through back corridors, shielding him from a crowd of fans who showed up at the courthouse. Reporter John Stewart describes the scene in the next day’s Democrat and Chronicle:
Bowie and his group ignored reporters’ shouted questions and fans’ yells as he walked in — except for one teenager who got his autograph as he stepped off the escalator.
His biggest greeting was the screams of about a half-dozen suspected prostitutes awaiting arraignment in the rear of the corridor outside the courtroom.
Asked for a plea by City Court Judge Alphonse Cassetti to the charge of fifth-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, Bowie said, “not guilty, sir.” The court used his real name — David Jones.
He stood demurely in front of the bench with his attorneys. He wore a gray three-piece leisure suit and a pale brown shirt. He was holding a matching hat. His two companions were arraigned on the same charge.
The defense lawyer told the judge that Bowie and the others had never been arrested before. The judge allowed them to remain free on bond until a grand jury convened. Bowie and his entourage went on with their tour, and the grand jury eventually decided not to indict anyone. The incident was largely forgotten until an auction house employee named Gary Hess stumbled on Bowie’s mug shot while sorting through the estate of a retired Rochester police officer. Hess rescued the photo from the trash bin, according to an article in Rochester Subway, and in late 2007 his brother sold it on eBay for $2,700.
For most musicians, a long-lost song written in their teenage years would be of interest only to serious fans — and even then, probably more for biographical reasons than as a standalone piece of work. But that’s hardly the case for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was composing advanced music at the age of five, and indeed completed the first act of his short life by adolescence. Hence the guaranteed appreciative audience for Serenade in C, a hitherto unknown piece recently discovered in the holdings of Germany’s Leipzig Municipal Libraries and first performed for the public just last week.
“Library researchers were compiling an edition of the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of Mozart’s work, when they stumbled across a mysterious bound manuscript containing a handwritten composition in brown ink,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson.
Composed in the mid-to-late 1760s, Serenade in C “consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio (two violins and a bass).” According to researchers, it “fits stylistically” the work of that period, “when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13”; a few years later, he’d outgrown (or transcended) this style of chamber music entirely.
You can see and hear Serenade in C in the video at the top of the post, performed earlier this month, not long after its premiere, on the steps of the Leipzig Opera by Vincent Geer, David Geer, and Elisabeth Zimmermann of the Leipzig School of Music’s youth symphony orchestra. Renamed Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, this “new” Mozart piece has been included in the latest Köchel catalog with the number K. 648. If you listen to it in the context of Mozart’s artistic evolution, you’ll also notice the ways in which it stands out in a period when he wrote mainly arias, symphonies, and piano music. As for the extent to which it prefigures things to come, it’s early enough that we should probably leave that question to the Mozartologists.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 2013, the curators of the touring museum exhibit “David Bowie Is” released a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads, providing us with deeper insights into his literary tastes. Covering fiction and non-fiction, the list spans six decades, moving from Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945) to Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason(2008). As we once noted in another post, “his list shows a lot of love to American writers, from … Truman Capote to … Hubert Selby, Jr., Saul Bellow, Junot Díaz, Jack Kerouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fellow Brits George Orwell, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishima and Bulgakov.” You can read the full list below, and, if you choose, also explore a related book from 2019–Bowie’s Bookshelf:The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life.
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Earlier this month, a North Carolina man was charged with generating songs using an artificial-intelligence system and configuring bots to stream them automatically, thus racking up some $10 million in illegal royalties. Though that amount no doubt startles many of us, in this age when legitimate musicians publicly lament the pittance they earn through streaming platforms, such a case probably comes as no surprise to Rick Beato. This past June, the prominent music YouTuber put out a video dealing with just that intersection of culture and technology, with the highly clickable title “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse.”
Consider the question of how we evoke one particular cultural era rather than another. We can use its fashions, its slang, or its interior decoration, to name just a few possibilities, but nothing works as powerfully or immediately as its music. Most of us grew up in a world where the sound of popular songs changed dramatically every decade or so. This happened for many reasons, practically all of them downstream of developments in technology. Bluesmen electrifying their guitars; Frank Sinatra singing into microphones sensitive enough to pick up his nuances; the Beatles creating complex, often strange miniature sound worlds in the studio; rappers telling their stories over looped fragments of disco records: all of it was made possible by feats of engineering.
Yet, in Beato’s view, technological progress has lately backfired on music, and both musicians and listeners are feeling it. The convergence of computers and music production is now complete, making any sound theoretically possible at virtually no cost. But “the creative dependence on technology limits the ability of people to innovate,” and “the overreliance on similar tools” brings about “a lack of diversity” and a persistence of formulaic trend-following. The ease of creation has caused “an oversaturation of music, making it harder to find really exceptional things.” This is taken to an extreme by the only-just-beginning avalanche of AI-generated songs (and the storm of lawsuits it has drawn).
Of course, if I’d known back when I was growing up in the nineteen-nineties that all the music I wanted to listen to would be made instantly available at little or no cost, I’d have regarded it as the imminent arrival of heaven on earth. Presumably, the prospect would also have excited the adolescent Beato, bagging groceries to save up the money to buy Led Zeppelin and Pat Metheny albums in the seventies. Today, by contrast, “music is not as valued by young people. There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it be part of your collection, having it be a part of your identity, of who you are.”
Music, in short, has become both too easy to produce and too easy to consume. It would be easy for anyone under 30 to dismiss Beato’s argument as that of a middle-aged man reflexively insisting that things were better in his day, when we knew the value of an album. But even the youngest generation of music-lovers must, at times, feel a certain dissatisfaction amid this endless abundance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your attention” by trying to listen to music deliberately, without distraction. Personally, I recommend listening to not just full albums but complete discographies, which at the very least cultivates a certain discernment. And to cross the musical landscape ahead of us, we’ll need all the discernment we can get.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
This Etsy seller isn’t peddling kombucha SCOBYs, letter pressing new baby announcements, or repurposing old barns for use as cutting boards.
No, Alcott’s crafty fortunes fall squarely at the intersection of pulp fiction and rock and roll, with classic song titles, lyrics, and other cunning references replacing the cover text of pre-existing vintage paperbacks.
As Alcott, who conceives of his mash ups as tributes to his long time musical favorites, told Open Culture:
Bowie dressed as an androgynous alien, went out onstage and told his audience “You’re not alone, give me your hands,” I can’t think of a more encompassing gesture to a misfit. No matter how weird you were in your community, you would always find someone like you at a Bowie concert. During a time of my life when I felt incredibly isolated and alone, (Bowie was one of) the key artists who made me feel like I was part of a bigger world, an artistic continuum.
Meanwhile, Alcott is tending to another continuum by posthumously pairing such late greats as Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury (“co-author” of the deep sea-themed Under Pressure cover, above) with the sort of adventurous, occasionally steamy reading material that were among the hallmarks of their 1950s’ boyhoods.
Many of these items have found their way to used book and thrift stores, where, tattered and worn, they provide a vast trove for someone like Alcott, who browses with his favorite acts’ catalogues deeply imprinted on his mental hard drive.
It must’ve been a grand day when he happened across the above 1970s sci fi cover. A few deft tweaks, and Life on Mars, a nonexistent “new adventure from the author of Space Oddity,” was born.
A quick heads up: On October 3rd, Stanford Continuing Studies will kick off an 8‑week online course called Did It Matter? Does It Now? The Music and Culture of the Grateful Dead. Led by David Gans (author of Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead), the course will feature a number of special guests, including Jesse Jarnow (host of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast), Dennis McNally (author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead) and David Lemieux (Grateful Dead Archivist). Open to any adult, the course description reads:
The Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking fusion of music, counterculture, and community engagement forged an enduring legacy that transcends generations while shaping the evolution of music and cultural expression. Nearly 30 years after the band played its last show, Grateful Dead music is more popular than ever—in both live and recorded form. This course invites students to delve into the phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead through a captivating exploration of the band’s history, music, and cultural impact.
The course will feature a collection of stories and conversations with scholars and historians, each offering facts and personal perspectives illuminating every aspect of the Grateful Dead culture. Together, we will take a guided tour of the music in the form of focused excerpts from live and studio performances to learn what makes the Dead’s music-making unique and explore the broad musical universe the band created in its 30-year history.
Finally, we’ll examine the Dead’s impact on society, diving into the band’s influence on art, literature, and social change, as well as its unique fan culture and the phenomenon of the Deadhead. By the end of the course, students will have a well-rounded appreciation for the roots, struggles, and milestones that shaped the Grateful Dead’s trajectory, an understanding of their profound impact on music and culture, and insight into a legacy that still resonates deeply today.
Again, the course starts on Thursday, October 3rd. Tuition is $465. You can enroll here.
Stanford Continuing Studies also offers many other courses online, across many disciplines, at a reasonable price. Check out the catalogue here.
Grab a cup of coffee, put on your thinking cap, and start working through this video from Minute Physics, which explains why guitars, violins and other instruments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos, it’s an entirely different story, a mathematical impossibility. Pianos are slightly but necessarily out of tune.
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